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gdc 2010 schedule

March 7th, 2010

Here’s my best guess at my GDC 2010 schedule. Please let me know about talks that you particularly recommend, whether before or after the fact—I was rather relieved when, partway through looking through this, I remember that my All Access Pass will let me listen to recordings of talks that I missed this year! Please say hi if you run into me; if you don’t know what I look like, the pictures at the top of this page are still reasonably accurate.

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

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mass effect 2

March 6th, 2010

The original Mass Effect was one of the games that pushed me into buying an Xbox 360. I played through it quickly and had a great time, though for whatever reason I haven’t spent much time thinking about it since then; BioWare seems to make games that push my buttons very well but don’t put deep hooks into me afterwards. Certainly my overall impression was positive enough to get me to go to a GDC talk some BioWare folks gave last year on how they were organizing their work on the sequel; and I’m very glad I did, because it was my favorite talk of the whole conference.

So I dutifully arranged my gameplay schedule so that I could get a copy of Mass Effect 2 on launch (which is rare for me, I only do that a couple of times a year); and again: great game. Possibly with a bit more to think about this time; we’ll see whether or not my brain returns to the game much over the coming months.

My first question: what effects of the aforementioned talk can we see in the final product? On a basic level, they seem to have executed solidly: the performance problems from the first game are gone (there are twisting corridors in some of the levels that exist only to allow upcoming areas to stream in, but they’re never long enough to be annoying), and the sequel was released two years and two months after the original, which suggests that they only had a slight slip in their schedule. In fact, they may not have slipped at all—BioWare released Dragon Age in the fall 2009 release slot, and they certainly wouldn’t have wanted to release two games right at the same time, so for all I know both games were in a releasable state and they just went with Dragon Age. I certainly never believed originally that all three games were going to appear on the same console, but now it seems quite likely that I was mistaken: this console generation is in no hurry to end, the Mass Effect team is getting a lot of mileage out of having your character’s decisions persist from one game to the next, and they’ve shown that they can produce a game in the series in a couple of years. So: chalk up one success for lean!

I also suspect that the iterative process that they use affected this game at a fairly basic plot level. If I wanted to make sure to hit a schedule in a video game, I would put in levels with the most important plot points that my best guess was that I could implement in half of my time budget; and then I’d add smaller (but still substantial!) chunks of additional material to fill up whatever time was left after I actually got done with the key parts. They didn’t do this with the original game, with the result that the game didn’t run smoothly and they had to make a substantial cut to their original vision in the world where you find Liara. In the sequel, in contrast, much of the game involves picking up a sequence of new characters, any of which could have been cut without leaving a noticeable gap; indeed, the presence of areas on the Normandy that should contain rooms but that are instead sealed off strongly suggests that they’ve plotted out further characters, though I don’t know whether they were part of the original vision or were always planned as DLC.

Furthermore, each of the characters contributes two missions to the plot: the mission where you originally recruit them and their loyalty mission; so, if they ran short on time, they could have jettisoned one of those missions without leaving a huge hole. Which is, I assume, what happened with Zaeed: he only has a loyalty mission, but no recruitment mission (and he also doesn’t have a full dialogue tree on ship), so my guess is that there’s a document somewhere describing a planned recruitment mission, but they simply didn’t have time to finish that for the launch date. So they put in the loyalty mission and packaged him as free-for-new-game-buyers DLC to serve as a way to get money from used game buyers. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one further character shows up as DLC, filling in a hole in the ship’s map.)

And, happily, the resulting plot worked well for the middle game of a trilogy. My guess is that they’ll resolve this iterative implementation tension in a different manner in the third game, because they can’t very well do another game that’s quite as heavily focused on recruitment. But manage it they will; and with two years of information about their rate of progress under their current system, maybe they’ll feel confident going back to slightly larger chunks.

Which I would be grateful for. The rhythm of Mass Effect 2, while pleasant enough, got to be a bit monotonous for me. I’m not sure that I wish that individual missions were longer (and, incidentally, I thought that they showed admirable restraint in the length of the final Omega Relay mission), but I wish that multiple missions had combined a bit better better into larger arcs. (To use a Nature of Order lens, they had Alternating Repetition down pat, but weren’t so hot with Levels of Scale.) They did, of course, group the missions into chunks (e.g. the initial recruitment missions versus the latter ones versus the loyalty missions), and there were several hub worlds which contained multiple missions, but neither of those forms of grouping really cohered for me: they felt more like loose aggregations than wholes that were greater than the sum of their parts.

What I most wished for along one those lines was for one of the city worlds to be larger (in the way that the Citadel was in the original, if my memories of it aren’t excessively rose-tinted): like the missions, I wished there’d been more levels of scale in the cities. Here, I am a bit nervous that, if I got what I wanted, I might not entirely like the result—certainly some of my desire for larger-scale city exploration stems from wanting anything good I’ve seen in any video game to be in any video game where that makes any sense at all, and with my recent appreciation of focus, I realize that that’s a dangerous path to follow. (And Mass Effect 2 is a great data point in that thesis: they cut out a large number of tradition RPG trappings and traditional shooter trappings, to very good effect!) In particular, the Mass Effect series has its focus, as I see it, to be a sort of homage to the space opera tradition in written and film science fiction; the best works in those traditions always make you feel that there’s a rich wonderful world to be explored if you could just stop and look around, but they don’t stop and look around, they continue on with the plot!

But, games aren’t books, games aren’t movies; and in games, I have control over where my character is going, so I’d like to be able to stop and look around a bit more. At least if doing so is feasible without pushing too much of a strain on development: if the team had decided to, say, make one of the cities four times as large, how many of the characters would they have had to cut out? If it’s a couple, and if they could find a way to work missions into that expanded city in a fashion that worked well with the plot, I would say go for it. Who knows, maybe that’s one of the ways that they’ll slice the third game into chunks that they can include or exclude depending on development time: get the core plot lines finished, and then spend half of their remaining time just making the Citadel be as awesome a place as it can be.

So: that’s some speculations about the game’s structure and development process, let’s move on to the characters. I recently talked about juvenile and adolescent games, ending by complaining about games that are childish in the stereotypical sense of the word, that are steeped in guy culture. And there’s certainly a fair amount of that in Mass Effect 2—Shepard is so badass that even getting killed barely puts a dent in her, and large explosions remain one of her key problem-solving strategies.

But there’s also a fair amount in the game that moves beyond that. As others have noted, there’s an awful lot of family going on in the loyalty missions, and there’s a fair amount of nuance there. Adolescence in particular, is a big theme, but adolescence treated respectfully and maturely: Jacob and Tali both realize that their fathers aren’t everything that they thought (or at least hoped) they were; Grunt was created fully-formed but still needs to experience adolescence; Jack’s childhood is horribly ripped from her, and she has to rebuild herself. Most poignantly for this parent, in Thane’s loyalty story we see this adolescent conflict from the opposite point of view; returning to the game development process theme from earlier in this post, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see Thane’s absorption in work while his son is growing up as a parable for the human consequences of a traditional game development process.

And then there’s the game’s meditations on race, even going so far as to visit the concept of genocide from multiple angles. I don’t feel particularly comfortable with my understanding of what the game is doing here, so I’ll mostly leave it to others to talk about the matter, but I will say that the series seems to be making a better effort than most to problematize the notion that killing aliens is okay if they look like the bad guys, and that the second game works to add perspectives.

The Paragon / Renegade distinction continues to work reasonably well, as far as binary morality systems go; while I still maxed out my Paragon score, I found myself making more Renegade choices in the sequel than I remember making in the original, which fits the sequel’s darker tone. But there’s certainly more to be done along these lines; I’d like to see somebody take a cue from Jane Jacobs and instead present a conflict between two positive moralities. (The game’s treatment of facial scarring in this context is bullshit, though.)

So: the first game in at least a year that I’ve finished within (approximately) a month after release, and I’m quite happy with that choice; and Mordin’s Gilbert and Sullivan parody is awesome and pleasantly unexpected. (His assistance in your romance is pretty great, too.) Now I just have to wait until the third game comes out! Maybe I’ll just pretend that Dragon Age didn’t come out last year, and treat it as BioWare’s Fall 2010 release?

A by no means comprehensive list of other posts on the game:

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the joy of tech trees

March 3rd, 2010

(See conflict of interest disclaimer.)

We launched Tiki Resort last month, and it took me a few days to come to grips with it. I was dutifully doing what the game told me to—placing buildings, gathering coins, clicking on messes to clean them up, feeding my tourists—and leveling up apace. But I was starting to get a little bored—just why am I doing this again?

And then I upgraded one of my existing buildings (I can’t quite remember what, maybe turning the Art Stand into the Island Art Emporium), and I thought, “you know, that upgraded building looks kind of neat!” And then I upgraded another, and thought, “this one looks pretty neat, too!” By the time I’d upgraded my Mini Golf into a Putt Hut I was really quite curious about further upgrades to that building would look like; and now, when I look at the level 1 Waterslides and Carnival buildings, I don’t say “that’s a meh waterslide”, I say, “wow, I bet my resort is going to look awesome once those are at level 3!”

Though, even after that, my brain wasn’t quite at ease—these upgrades are just eye candy, right, their effect on gameplay is ultimately pretty minimal? At which point I had flashbacks to my experiences playing Burnout Paradise and reading other people fail to appreciate the game because of the direction in which they approached it. Yes, if you see Burnout Paradise as a race game, then billboards and smash gates seem like “the the obligatory inclusion of hidden collectables [that] make no sense in the context of Burnout [because they] reward stopping”. But when I stopped coming at Burnout Paradise from a race game perspective (and I’d never played the previous games, so I didn’t have the series’s legacy weighing on me), that completely stopped mattering—finding stuff to smash is cool, and the strategic planning required for billboards is a plus instead of a minus! And it’s the same for me with Tiki Resort—the traditional counters of levels, money, etc. are all well and good, but ultimately the reason why I’m enjoying the game is because I want to see what the buildings look like, and what the island as a whole will look like with all the buildings working together.

So this game turns out to be an ode to tech trees. And not tech trees in some sort of utilitarian sense of tools to develop your character to overcome external challenges: just tech trees that are neat to explore, where the branches and leaves are pleasant objects in their own right. In fact, playing Tiki Resort at the same time as I was playing Mass Effect 2 got me wondering: the latter game is also full of tech trees, in the form of your characters’ skills and the weapon/ship/armor/etc. upgrades that you can research. And yes, I dutifully researched those, but now I’m wondering: how much of my desire to do so had to do with the rest of the game play, and how much had to do with my just feeling compelled to follow tech trees? I liked the idea of upgrading my powers, but the truth is that I generally used the same power over and over again (Incinerate!), and upgrading those powers didn’t reveal any significant new aspects to them, they were just the same basic idea with slightly higher stats. (With a slight exception for their fourth levels.)

I blogged about combat fatigue recently, and I’ve also started to feel a sense of narrative fatigue. Not that I think that either combat or narrative are bad things: in particular, I have quite a bit of respect for games that are really focused on combat, and I’m happy to be swept along by a game that is more interactive cinema than anything else. But there are too many games that don’t know the virtues of restraint, that throw in gameplay devices because they are expected rather than because those devices strengthen the impact that the game is making. So it’s refreshing to see games that take a step back from such trappings, that take less prominent aspects of video games and focus on strengthening those. With the result that you end up with a game that just worries about using tech trees to build up a neat space (Tiki Resort; for a more extreme focus on cool tech trees, see GROW ver. 1), or a game that focuses on the joys of mapping (Small Worlds; it’s not a coincidence that I gave up on Etrian Odyssey as it was insisting on rubbing JRPG conventions into my face).

So hey, focus, let’s go with that as a virtue. Another thing to keep my eyes open for as I try to spend more time playing and talking about short games.

A couple of points that didn’t really fit into the flow above, but that I won’t find time to expand on elsewhere:

  • The idea of having animals that ask you to pet them on quite frequent intervals (once a minute?) turns out to be a very effective mechanic to get you (or at least me) to not just leave a game open in a separate window to accumulate money but to return to it constantly. (And hence, presumably, get more and more invested into it; which petting virtual animals also fosters directly, of course.)
  • For another example of a game with stuff that just looks cool, check out Social City. We only launched it yesterday, but I’m totally in love with all the animations.

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conflict of interest disclaimer

March 2nd, 2010

Since I occasionally blog about games published by my employer, I figure I might as well have a generic “conflict of interest” post I can refer to. So:

  • If I post about Playdom games, I have a conflict of interest.
  • Anything I talk about is strictly my own opinion; in fact, I’ll try to avoid talking about matters where my employment at Playdom gives me some extra insight into what I’m saying about the games in question.
  • While I’m at it, in general the details of my posts about Facebook games may age more quickly than those in my posts about other sorts of games. The games change all the time; for that matter, because of A/B testing, different people may even have different experiences playing the same game at the same time. Also, I may occasionally post about Playdom games fairly soon after their public launch, when they’re in an even larger amount of flux than normal.

On that second point: I haven’t been part of a game team at Playdom, so I don’t actually have deep knowledge about the details of individual games! Instead, I’ve been on the Business Intelligence team, which is a cross-game team whose job is to get insight about players’ behavior. That will be changing soon, though—I’ll be transitioning over to our RPG team around the middle of the month. Which I’m looking forward to, though I’ve also really enjoyed my time with the BI team: for one thing, I’m curious to see game making from the inside, and, for another thing, I’ve been a C++ programmer for long enough that it’s time to try something new. Which makes it ironic that the BI team is starting to explore Hadoop (with a corresponding switch to a Java-based infrastructure) just as I’m leaving them; a pity, it would be interesting to see that technological transition through.

My transitioning to a game team has been the plan since before I joined Playdom; it’s very much to the company’s credit that they’ve gone out of their way to fulfill this bargain, since I’m sure there are many companies out there that would say one thing to get you on board and then change their tune after you’ve joined. One of the many reasons why I like working there; on which note, we are, as always, hiring. Lots of interesting things to do, whether you like making games or processing and understanding huge volumes of user data.

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slitherlink

February 23rd, 2010

When I was growing up, I had a subscription to Games magazine. It’s a puzzle magazine whose main feature is the “pencilwise” section that takes up the middle chunk; crosswords are always most prominent in that section, but they’re always in a minority, with a wide range of other puzzle formats keeping them company.

Lots of fun; one fallout that I particularly remember was having my desk moved by a high school science teacher (who also happened to be my mother) because a friend of mine and I kept on talking about cryptic crossword solutions. I let my subscription lapse when I went away to college, though, since I had more than enough else to keep me busy.

I would still look for copies when I was traveling, however, because it’s a perfect accompaniment for a plane trip. And new puzzle varieties appeared in its pages over the years; Liesl and I both went through a big Paint by Numbers phase, for example. But one trio of new puzzles caught my eye in particular: Nurikabe, Masyu, and Slitherlink. Unlike crossword puzzles, they’re pure logic puzzles, not depending on any sort of outside knowledge; unlike Sudoku, your solution largely develops locally, so if you discover you’ve made a mistake, you can usually fix it without having to start over from scratch. They all develop in a wonderfully organic fashion, with tendrils starting in various places on the puzzle, and slowly extending until they’ve all met and completed the puzzle.

Eventually, I noticed that Games magazine got all of those three puzzle types from the same source, namely Nikoli. Which is a Japanese company, so I couldn’t find their books in American stores; I poked around, though, and found a few other sources of Nurikabe puzzles. Which proved to be a disappointment: the solutions just didn’t unfold in the same organic way as the solutions to Nikoli-authored puzzles did. So it’s not just the rules of the puzzle that matters: even though it’s a puzzle of pure logic, the author makes a real difference.

At some point, I had enough different Japanese products that I wanted that I couldn’t find in the U.S. that I figured I’d order from Amazon Japan; and I threw a few Nikoli books into the mix. And I’m very glad I did: if you order enough stuff to spread out the worst of the shipping costs, they’re actually quite cheap, contain dozens of hours of entertainment, and even fit into a jeans pocket in a pinch. (Which is convenient if you’re on a trip, if you naturally go through museums slightly faster than your travel companions, and if you have to check your backpack.) I had great fun going through the nurikabe and masyu books that I ordered, didn’t like another one (Numberlink) so much, and was enjoying slitherlink.

But even though I was enjoying Slitherlink, I wasn’t at ease with it in the same way as I was with Nurikabe and Masyu. My solutions to the latter ones unfolded smoothly (honestly, to the extent that they’re a bit easy, though never unpleasant), whereas with Slitherlink, I was constantly getting stuck and having to search all over for my next move. It got bad enough that, when trying and failing to do the last puzzle in the second (of four) sizes in the book, I was ready to give up: the puzzle was taking me ages, I was reading possibilities ahead hoping in vain for contradictions, and I just wasn’t enjoying myself any more; and the larger sizes ahead of me would just exacerbate those problems.

Out of stubborn pride, though, I decided to take one last swing at finishing that puzzle. I gave up all sense of shame, and marked down on the puzzle every little thing I knew: if a square was marked as a zero, I would dutifully put little x’s on all four sides, even though it was obvious that lines couldn’t go on those sides. And, in doing so, two surprising things happened: for one thing, I noticed several places where I hadn’t noticed that I could apply simple rules (instead of searching in depth). And, for another thing, I discovered several new consequences of the rules! As the text version of the rules says,

Its greatest feature is countless theorems. Experience the feeling of getting much skilled when you find new theorem.

Which I’d mostly decided by that point was puffery: yes, I’d found three or four theorems, but it had been ages since I’d found any more, surely I’d found all there were? Apparently not, and, as became clear as I proceeded further through the book, I wasn’t even particularly close to discovering all the useful theorems.

And wow, what a puzzle form Slitherlink turns out to be, to the extent that it’s now my favorite logic puzzle format. Which is due to two reasons, namely:

  • It balances local and global requirements.

The main lesson I’ve learned from the Nikoli games is that I like puzzles where I spend most of my time figuring out what’s going on locally, but where the puzzle has just enough of a global constraint to give an overall structure.

Slitherlink is a fine example of that: the rule that each numbered square tells you how many sides are filled in is purely local, and while the rule that the solution forms a single loop looks global (and is, of course), it has a few immediate local corollaries, namely that you can’t have dead-ends, branches, or tiny loops. Because of this, I can spend time developing a front, I can move from one front to another if I get stuck, I can (usually) only erase a portion of the puzzle if I find I’ve made a mistake, and I can occasionally get surprised by looking at the whole puzzle and realizing that my next move is forced by a large loop that is almost closed.

  • The balance between following mindless rules, higher-level rules, and exhaustive search.

This one is a little more subtle. Any puzzle has rules, which frequently directly force your move. And any good puzzle is going to have situations where you just have to read out the consequences of options, hoping to find a contradiction before you get too far.

But if you do too much of the former, you get bored; if you do too much of the latter, you get frustrated. And what Slitherlink shows is that there’s a third choice: there are constraints that are true but not immediately obvious from the game’s rules. As you discover this, your rule-following behavior becomes richer (because there are more patterns to recognize), and your exhaustive search also becomes richer (because you can search more deeply, with the help of these extra rules to prune your search). And, in a further reward loop, you can occasionally systematize the result of an exhaustive search in the form of a newly-discovered higher-level rule.

Most of the puzzles in the second half of the book took me more than an hour to solve, and I’m sure several took me more than two hours to solve; normally, that would be a sign that I’m banging my head against the wall in frustration, but not this time. I’m sure that, as I work through further Slitherlink books, the puzzles will become more routine, and I’ll be looking for something new, but for now it’s great fun.

(Incidentally, my main takeaway from the iPad launch: I really hope that Nikoli produces games for that device. They have some Akari puzzles for the iPhone, which I highly recommend, but the iPhone is too small for their richest puzzles; the iPad could be a perfect device for those puzzles, though.)

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small worlds

February 18th, 2010

(Short game spoiler disclaimer: Small Worlds takes about 15 minutes to play.)

Small Worlds is the first in what I hope will be an irregular ongoing series of short game posts. And, as such, it leaves me nervous: while I imagine many of y’all will be just fine with me not writing 1500 words every time I post here, I am worried about going in the opposite extreme with these games. And I’m dipping into a vibrant culture, as an outsider who is only faintly aware of that culture’s history and discussions.

For an example of the latter, take the view that confronted me when I started the game: pixels, and very large ones at that. I hear that big pixels are all the rage in the indie scene, to the extent that some people feel that they’re rather overdone these days. Am I supposed to be viewing the game through such a lens, as commentary, as part of a conversation, as (given their excessive size) satire? Beats me; I shrug and start moving around.

At which point I get my first delightful surprise: the pixels shrink, and rather than being a ridiculously oversized yet ill-definied avatar only able to see a small portion of the map at any given moment, the map instead resizes so that the parts that you’ve uncovered are all visible on the screen.

Indeed, the word ‘avatar’ proves to be rather inappropriate. Formally, the game acts like a platformer, but its feel is different. You’re not a character trying to make it through hostile terrain, to overcome hostile enemies (in fact, there are no enemies in this game): instead, you are a player trying to uncover more and more of the map.

This dual role of actor / mapper has a long history in games, of course, from the maps that every player of Colossal Cave Adventure drew to 2007’s Etrian Odyssey. As somebody who enjoys the mapping at least as much as the other aspects of gameplay in such games, it’s refreshing for the mapping to be front and center; and, as you play, you find that the map as an object is much more aesthetically appealing than it is in dungeon crawlers. It becomes clear as the map gets more detailed that you’re traveling through some sort of ruins, largely underground but with domes on the to; the expansion of the map is always giving you glimpses of adjacent rooms, but you have to take a spiral route to be able to get to their interiors. (And the pixels turn from large blocks into something much closer to their traditional usage of points on a monitor.)

And the map’s ruined nature naturally lends itself to forks and dead-ends. But there’s never significant branching; as with the main game I’m playing now, Mass Effect 2, you never have to go too far before figuring out which direction is the main path forward and which are the side areas. Which makes my brain happy: I like exploring, I like having nooks and crannies to stick my nose into, but I don’t want to either miss any or waste my time with lengthy backtracking / uncertainty.

So I happily explore, making sure to do all the side routes. And then I go to the back of one room with a particularly shiny bit, and all of a sudden everything changes.

My first reaction: annoyance, I didn’t get to see all the nooks and crannies! My second reaction: oh, I’m back to big pixels; looks like another map to explore, neat! My third reaction: this music is really rather lovely. Was there even any music in the hub world? (Not really, as it turns out: ambient noises / sounds that served more to emphasize the “exploring ruined station” theme than as a real soundtrack.)

And that second world was delightful in a rather different way. I can’t actually remember which world was the next world: it turned out that there are four worlds off of the original world (so phew, I got a chance to make up my missed exploring in that first world), but they’re all much more organic, much more embedded in nature than the original spooky space station world. One has a spring feel with water, one has a winter feel, with snow; one feels like the ruins of an egg, one is perhaps a cavern but with more of an earthy feel than a ruined feel. And each world’s soundtrack complements it nicely.

The details of the gameplay expand a bit, too. You’re frequently spiraling, but not always, and in one case you’re spiraling in rather than out. Alternate routes occasionally appear as well. And the goal has a different flavor: the game plays with flickering lights even in the original world, but, in the other four worlds, the gate is a pulsing, glowing ball. Sometimes, the glow coming off of it is visible from the start, pulling you in as you revolve around it; sometimes, you go through almost the entire level before catching a glimpse of it.

And then you go through all of the levels, and you end up in an escape pod in the original station, blasting off. (So I guess it was a space station, despite the trees at the top?) Which raises the question: what to make of these levels? The title of the game suggests that they’re different worlds, and they’re all quite different from each other; but they all share a wistful, ruined aesthetic, making me wonder how to put them together. The post-distaster aesthetic of the original level and the rockets present in one of the later one hint, to me, at a post-nuclear-war environment, but who knows; maybe the different but related world that goes by in the background of the title screen would help me figure this out if I were to stare at it longer.

A delightful mechanic, and a lovely aesthetic. Not, perhaps, a deep mechanic (though, perhaps, a deep aesthetic); it, like the Grow games, makes me wonder whether or not the mechanic has been copied elsewhere? I imagine so; I also imagine that copies of either game’s mechanic would lead to much less satisfying experiences, but I’d like to see other people prove me wrong.

Playing through this game has certainly given me confidence in the virtues of this experiment: I’ve been wanting denser game experiences more recently, and a game that shows me a couple of new things and finishes after 15 minutes (while having me still thinking about it weeks after I first experienced it), is a great example of that. Much better a game like this than dozens of hours of repetitive grind.

(Many thanks to The Game Critique for pointing out this game to me; I’m sure I would have eventually reached it going through Chris Hyde’s list, too.)

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short games and spoilers

February 17th, 2010

As I mentioned last month, I’m planning to write more about short games. Which is, I fear somewhat at tension with my current policy vis-a-vis spoilers, namely that I don’t worry about spoilers at all. I don’t go out of my way to highlight them, and probably the fact that I discuss game plots relatively little means that they’re not too thick on the ground in my posts, but they’re certainly there.

I do this because I’ll be less likely to be able to talk about what really interests me if I avoid spoilers, and because I think scrupulous spoiler avoidance urges us inappropriately to take a standard review approach. And I don’t worry about spoiling things for my audience because I generally play games rather later than the curve, and because there are enough other web sites out there to do spoiler-free reviews that, if you’re particularly worried about such things but still need information about a game before playing it, you’ll have more than enough places to find such information. So I figure that people who read my posts on games have either already played through the games in question or are unlikely enough to do so that my spoiling some aspect of the game won’t bother them.

With short games, though, the tensions change. There isn’t a massive industry dedicated to reviewing such games; there isn’t huge release date hype pressuring us to play the games as soon as they’re launched; and they’re more likely to turn on one surprising design element that players might prefer to uncover for themselves. But, on the flip side, the reasons for not avoiding spoilers are at least as strong for short games: in particular, if they turn on one surprising design element and I don’t talk about that, than what am I supposed to talk about?

Fortunately, the short length of the games themselves give me an out: if a game only takes five or fifteen minutes to play, and if people don’t want to have their experience of the game spoiled, then they can just go and play the game! So what I am planning to do is this: in the first paragraph of discussions of such games, I’ll give a link to where you can play it and an estimate of how long it will take. If you don’t want to your experience of the game to be spoiled but still are curious about what I have to say, then click on that link; I’ll be there when you come back.

Of course, this is all a bit academic while Mass Effect 2 has me in its clutches…

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random links: february 16, 2010

February 16th, 2010

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tax software recommendations?

February 15th, 2010

This year I’ll be putting down my pencil and calculator and doing my taxes on a computer for the first time; any recommendations for software I should use? Either something web-based or something that will run on a Mac is fine with me.

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yakuza 2

February 9th, 2010

There was a time towards the end of 2008 when it seemed like everybody in my twitter feed was talking about Yakuza 2. It was apparently a Shenmue-style action RPG (also published by Sega), but (as Steve Gaynor so eloquently outlined in the 2008 holiday confab) filled with delightfully quirky side missions, missions that added a lot more to the game’s charm and enjoyment than the main quest did. And, as a bonus, Sega left the Japanese voice acting intact when bringing it to the U.S.! I didn’t get around to playing it at the time—I chose Persona 3 as my JRPG that winter—but the discussion stuck in my head enough that I finally got around to playing it last month.

I am a big Shenmue fan, to the extent that hearing Yakuza 2 compared to Shenmue made me nervous rather than pleased: I was fairly sure that I was going to be disappointed if I thought too much about that comparison. So I decided to keep that comparison out of my head as much as possible, to try to appreciate the newer game on its own merits.

Which, for a while, I managed to do. Yakuza 2 started off with cut scene after cut scene after cut scene (and why did the game need to load between cut scenes instead of streaming them seamlessly off disk? Were they not prerendered?), but the back story seemed interesting enough, so I was willing to give that a pass. I liked the plot just fine—an odd couple of gangster and cop, warring clans with an old wise man and a changing of the guards, past events coming back to bite you, and all the twists and turns that you’d hope for. The Japanese voice acting was rather good, and, as a bonus, helped my studies: I wouldn’t have wanted to play the game without subtitles, but I could pick up enough from listening to make me happy. (And also enough to notice that, in some situations, they picked different readings for names in the subtitles than were used in the voice acting; oops.) There’s a lot to do in the cities, and many of the side quests seemed pleasantly quirky. And Goro Majima is one of my favorite NPCs ever.

Despite which, the game started to go sour, at two turning points in particular. In the first, I was wandering all over town trying to trigger a cut scene so I could progress the main story line. I had no idea where to go, and ended up looking everywhere; eventually, I stumbled past a male host club, where I was more or less forced to take a job that I had no interest in, and that made no sense for me right then, given that I was in the company of a female cop. And, adding insult to injury, that side mission left a big green directional symbol on my map. I was all for quirky side missions when I started the game; but I wasn’t in the mood for one right then, I doubt I would have particularly enjoyed that one even in better situations, and I was actively annoyed by having the map tell me where to go to do something I didn’t want to do while refusing to tell me how to make progress in the actual story!

The second (much worse) one was when I was wandering around Osaka with Haruka, the main character’s daughter-figure. She was great: I loved the way she was all gangly arms and legs, the way she had to run to keep up but was full of energy and happy to be going anywhere as long as she was with you.

And then you ran across some creep from a talent agency; Haruka, being a sensible child, wanted nothing to do with him. I was willing to write this off as a tone-deaf sidequest, until it became clear that this wasn’t a sidequest at all: the game was going to insist on my meeting with said creep again, and, to my horror, to my character agreeing to sign up Haruka with him. Fortunately, she protested enough to get my character to back off of that, but really: is anybody who worked on this game a parent? When you are confronted by a creep, when your daughter clearly and repeatedly expresses no interest in having anything to do with said creep, then what you do is stay far far away; you do not sign your daughter over to said creep’s care, especially only a couple of hours after meeting him for the first time!

After that, whatever bloom was left on the rose had gone away for me. I played through the rest of the game (including another outing with your daughter, that managed to turn a potentially delightful interlude into a boring-though-mercifully-creep-free grind through the city waiting for a cut scene to trigger), and actually basically enjoyed it. But whatever magic others had seen in the game just wasn’t there for me.

And while I tried to keep the Shenmue comparisons out of my head when I started the game, they had come back in full force by this point. And my opinion on that matter is doubtlessly clear by now: Yakuza 2 is no Shenmue, and it is (perhaps even more strongly) no Shenmue II. Or at least it’s no match for my nine year old memories of Shenmue, but I’m fairly confident that, while the latter game may have warts that the haze of memory has softened, I would still find it far superior if I were to play it for the first time now.

Take the cities that you can wander around. I’m almost positive those in Yakuza 2 are significantly larger than those in the Shenmue games, though I’m not sure that they grew more than you’d expect from the general march of technology. But Yakuza 2‘s are much more homogeneous: the game presents you with sizeable chunks of two cities on opposite halves of Japan (which the game tries to emphasize with the plot and the Osakan dialect), yet it all has a much more homogenous feel than you get simply walking down the hill from Ryo Hazuki’s house to the local shopping district at the start of Shenmue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a consistent visual style where it fits, I certainly wouldn’t want change for the sake of change, but in the Shenmue series the changes in scenery were never forced, the game simply presented different regions that had naturally evolved differently in their different contexts. (Which we saw even more spectacularly in Shenmue II than in the first game.)

That’s the cities at a macro level, but, more importantly, Shenmue had Yakuza 2 beat at a micro level hands down. I’ll never forget the way Shenmue starts you off in a house where you can look at everything; it didn’t manage that level of loving modeling throughout the game, but it continued to have its share of places where you just wanted to stop and take a look around you. I never felt that way in Yakuza 2, and indeed I didn’t have the camera control much of the time to let me look around even if I’d wanted to!

This theme of less sprawling but richer experiences in Shenmue is present in the combat, as well. Yakuza 2 is a brawler; the fighting system is pleasant enough, but (despite all the leveling up options) nothing to write home about, as far as I was concerned. This shallowness doesn’t stop the game from insisting on having you fight all the time, however: that’s great in the sequences in the game where you have to go through enemies for a focused goal, but the last thing I want when wandering around a city and trying to drink it in is to be accosted by punks every block or two. (Yakuza 2‘s atmosphere may have a less complex flavor than some, but there’s still enough there to make it worth experiencing!) It’s the same sort of combat fatigue that I blogged about recently in the context of BioShock: games that have clearly put in a lot of effort into building up a world, but constantly jerk you out of it to beat up somebody.

If I’m remembering correctly, Shenmue didn’t have such random battles at all: if you wanted to wander around the city, you could do so, with interrupts driven much more naturally by the clock instead of by combat. (I may be over-romanticizing this in hindsight, judging from my notes at the time, but the use of forced street fights as a source of money in Yakuza 2 gave me a lot more respect for the job system in the Shenmue games.) And, on the flip side, the combat system in Shenmue was much richer than that in Yakuza 2: Shenmue contains a fully-fledged fighting system, so if you want to take the time to hone your combat art, that game will give you the means and space to do so.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Christopher Alexander analyses (hmm, I really should get around to reading the fourth volume of The Nature of Order, shouldn’t I?); I suspect that Shenmue would come out well in that regard. In comparison to Yakuza 2, it does much better with Levels of Scale (going down to smaller levels, in particular), which in turn leads to Strong Centers, and its gameplay has more Positive Space and Contrast, developing (especially in Shenmue II‘s final act) into The Void and Simplicity and Inner Calm. Is it time, perhaps, for me to replay those games, if I can get my Dreamcast to cooperate? I wonder if I could get other Vintage Game Club members to go along.

Other discussion of Yakuza 2 (including some linked to above); I only wish I could include an archive of the relevant Twitter chatter:

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with the light

February 5th, 2010

I was planning to mention With the Light in my blog post the other day on juvenile and adolescent games, but I forgot. Actually, though, I’m kind of glad I did, because it’s a good enough work to deserve its own discussion as a positive example of those themes. So I’ll discuss it (or, rather, its first volume, because that’s the only volume that I’ve finished) here.

With the Light is a comic book (a manga, specifically), rather than a game; in this country, both art forms are similarly marked as juvenile/adolescent, though I suspect that isn’t as true (especially for comics) in Japan, where With the Light comes from. (I could easily be wrong, however.) This series isn’t juvenile literature, however, though my daughter can attest that at least one kid finds it accessible, even engrossing.

And I’m very impressed by the book. A few reasons:

  • The variety and realism of its characters.

The book’s subtitle is “Raising an Autistic Child”, and the most prominent characters are Hikaru, the child of the title, and Sachiko, his mother. Which goes some way towards breaking the characters out of cookie-cutter mode, but runs the risk of setting up cardboard characters of a different sort. To me, though, the book never fell into that trap: Hikaru in particular isn’t presented as some sort of generic autistic child, he’s got his own specific characteristics, weaknesses, and even (as seems to be somewhat a theme of the second volume) impressive and idiosyncratic strengths.

  • Its focus on interactions and interaction pitfalls.

Over and over, we see the book seeing people who are talking right past each other, acting at loggerheads; if and when they finally manage to understand what the other side is doing and get a glimpse of the other side’s perspective, everything about the pair’s interactions improves. The book is filled with compassion, but compassion in a hard-nosed sense: not “just try to understand the other person and things will magically get better” but “here are some of Hikaru’s triggers, here are some specific perception differences between autistic kids and non-autistic kids that can lead to behavior that you may misinterpret, here are some strategies that have been known to help bridge communication gaps in these contexts, give them a try and keep your eyes open as to what’s working and what’s not”. (There seems to be quite a lot of detailed research and experience informing the book’s descriptions of strategies and perception differences, incidentally.)

And the interaction problems aren’t just between Hikaru and non-autistic people: most of the characters in the book have their quirks and issues that cause them to behave badly at times, understanding what’s going on helps a lot. This was the part of the book that hit home the most to me—I’m sure that if I’d been in a slightly more maudlin mood while reading it, I would have broken down crying—because I’ve certainly been known to put a less-than-gracious mental spin on what I label as recalcitrant behavior from my own daughter when all that’s going on is that she’s tired! It’s a lesson that I still need reminders of; popping up the stack a bit, it’s a mistake that I probably make most frequently when I’m tired or upset for some other reason, so I should probably also use these tools to improve my interactions with my own mind…

  • The way goals change when they meet reality.

The book doesn’t focus on Hikaru’s father Masato as much as on his mother, but he’s certainly there, and portrayed none too flattering at first. He has a goal for his life; it’s a lot more focused on his business success, with his family playing a fairly distant second fiddle, and Hikaru’s diagnosis throws a rather large wrench into those plans. Which Masato reacts badly to (to put it mildly); eventually, though, he comes around, and is much the better for it.

Which is, perhaps, a fairly banal plot point; I bring it up for two reasons. The first is that it’s a banal plot point that games don’t typically manage: while sudden disruptions are common in the start of games, games usually have characters react by attacking the disruption rather than by working with the disruption. (Though Passage did a wonderful job of handling having your plans change because of the presence of another person.) The second is that I’ve gone through one major career change in my life that wasn’t initially particularly of my own volition; even though my disruption was much less profound than Masato’s, I can sympathize with him, and I can very much relate to ultimately ending up in a better situation than I was in before that career disruption.

  • Its balancing of contingency and personal efforts.

Hikaru and Sachiko go through a lot, but much of the time things end up turning out pretty well. Their own hard work is very important to that end, but equally important is the fact that they run into some pretty special people along the way. And, again, this matches my own life: I try to work hard to put myself in a position to succeed, but over and over again I’ve gotten extremely lucky with the people I meet and the situations I’m in. (There was certainly a good deal of both in the last two jobs that I’ve gotten, for example.) So I appreciate it when I see a book that doesn’t attribute good outcomes solely to one factor or the other.

It’s a really special book, and thoroughly engrossing to boot. I’ll certainly happily cite its existence as an example of the contingencies that have enriched my life: I’m very fortunate to be living in an era when manga featuring an autistic lead character is being translated and brought over the ocean so I can read it, because I can imagine many many worlds where that would never happen. And I look forward to a world where games’ conception of understanding interactions more regularly goes beyond finding the weak spots in a boss monster’s patters so you can attack it and instead moves on to lower key but much more profound appreciations of differences in perspective.

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juvenile and adolescent games

February 1st, 2010

When Michael reviewed MySims Agents, I knew I had to get it for my daughter for Christmas, and my hopes for the game weren’t misplaced: it looks both fun and charming, she loved it, my wife blazed right through it, and I’ll give it a spin as soon as I’m done with Mass Effect 2.

But it’s also thrown me for a bit of a loop, because it’s undeniably a juvenile game, in the same way that, to pick a random example, Comet in Moominland is a juvenile book. Which is absolutely fine, even delightful—I read ten books by Madeline L’Engle during the last month alone, so I’m certainly not one to shy away from books intended more for my daughter than myself! But I’ve studiously avoided thinking about video games in those terms, avoided trying to distinguish between games intended for kids and games (e.g. Wii Sports) that are accessible to a wide audience but not targeted specifically at kids.

The main reason why I’ve avoided classifying games in that fashion is because I see that classification made far too often around me, in the context of polemics that I disagree with; it’s usually used to support claims that I consider both wrong and boring, leading me to head in the other direction when I run across such discussions. But given the existence of MySims Agents and the usefulness I find in the distinction for books, it’s time for me to take another look at the idea of juvenile games.

For example: are the Mario games juvenile games? What about the Zelda games? Honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss here. The Mario games certainly have something in common with juvenile literature, in that they’re quite happy to not locate themselves in the real world—see the aforementioned Moomintroll series for a delightful literary example. I’m loath to make too much of this particular distinction, though: aside from the existence of many many fantasy and science fiction novels for adults, I tend to think that the insistence of the importance of the fantastic/realist distinction in adult literature is more of a bug than a feature, and a bug that’s localized to my particular location in space and time at that.

And juvenile novels are written in a language that kids can read, and frequently features child protagonists. But I’m loath to make too much of those distinctions, either: we don’t have to use fancy words to prove how adult we are, and surely we can all enjoy books that feature protagonists that differ from us in one way or another? So, while I can come up with ways to tell that a books isn’t juvenile literature (because of the style of language, because of sex, because of certain other topics), I found it surprisingly difficult to come up with a positive and non-banal description of what it means for a book to be juvenile literature. And that carries over to video games as well: to return to my examples above, I still don’t know if the Mario games are juvenile games or not. (And I am apparently not alone; though, if I had to come down one way or another, I suppose my gut would agree with Stephen Totilo’s in labeling the series as juvenile. It’s less clear to me than MySims Agents, though: in the latter, having kids acting out adult roles in a non-realistic context is a marker.)

The other series I mentioned, though, is a different case: the Zelda games are, at their core, adolescent games. Not in the sense that adults or children wouldn’t enjoy them, but in the sense that they’re about boys growing up (literally, in the case of Ocarina), forced to be men a little earlier than they’d like to, but rising to the occasion, finding out who they really are, finding unexpected depths inside themselves. As with juvenile books, I want to emphasize: this is in no sense a criticism, I love bildungsromans enough to have copies of most of Herman Hesse’s books on my shelf in both German and English. (And one could claim that I’m still trying to figure out what it is that I want to be when I grow up!) But a coming of age story is, to me, a strong indicator of adolescent literature.

And it’s one that you’ll find all over the place in video games, present in a deep structural sense. In every role-playing game, your character starts out weak, but becomes more and more competent over the course of the game, with his or her capabilities consciously guided through your choices. And these elements are popular enough to have gotten grafted onto other genres—BioShock, for example takes RPG elements and melds then with an FPS core foundation.

And, of course, BioShock is an adolescent game in other ways—its core conflict comes down to, basically, “Son, do this. No, dad, you can’t tell me what to do! Yes, son, I can! No, dad, you can’t!” This is repeated with a second father figure, just in case you didn’t get it the first time; if that’s not a sign of a game about adolescence, I don’t know what is.

Actually, BioShock grabs me in this context for a second reason: Andrew Ryan’s “these are my toys, and if you don’t like that, I’m going to take my forest and go home” speech. I was going to say that that’s not just adolescent, it brings us back to our “juvenile games” theme, but, actually, most kids I know wouldn’t behave that way, either; it’s using the term “childish” instead in the sense of an anti-child prejudice that adults bring out when discussing aspects of their own behavior that they’d prefer to ignore.

Which brings me, in turn, to another context in which the word “adolescent” has come up recently in video game criticism, namely Heather Chaplin’s GDC 2009 rant. I didn’t attend it in person, but I have listened to the audio, and in general I think she’s spot on. She’s not using the term adolescent in the positive sense of growth, of figuring out who we are: instead, her complaints are with game designers and players who are childish in the sense of my previous paragraph, who refuse to grow up and take on real responsibilities, who are instead mired in “guy culture” despite being grown men, who “fear responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery”. And, as she continues, “when you’re talking about culture makers, this is a problem.” Indeed.

(And, just in case you might think that her concerns about the omnipresence of guy culture in game design are overblown: the very next speaker in the rant, when needing to fill some time while fiddling with his computer, decides to joke about blow jobs. And yes, I realize that the GDC rant panels are situations where one might reasonably say things that you wouldn’t say in the more polite sessions in the conference, but he wasn’t doing this for any sort of polemical or oratorical reason, he just thought that such joking was a great way to spend time in a professional conference; and the next two voices we heard after him, both also male, thought that this was a good enough idea that they both took the joke and ran with it. Really, guys, what the fuck?)

Returning to my previous themes: while I have a hard time carving out distinguishing characteristics of juvenile literature, I have an easier time carving out distinguishing characteristics of adult literature. Heather’s list of guy culture fears gives some candidates; parenting is one candidate that I’ll nominate from my own life, as is moving beyond romance and the initial falling in love and instead making a life with your partner through thick and thin, through excitement and banality. And these are, in general, sorely absent in video games, or present only in a distorted form. (I just finished Yakuza 2, and the one bit of hands-on parenting in that game rang horribly false.)

There are, perhaps, glimmers, of hope—I hear that Dragon Age: Origins handles relationships in a more nuanced fashion, and there’s always Jason Rohrer to give me hope. (In that same GDC rant panel, Clint Hocking warned that AAA game makers were having their butts kicked by indie game makers, which is all to the good.) But there’s an awful lot of adolescent guy culture to make our way out of, first.

And of course, as with my discussion of the term “childish”: the examples that Heather gave of responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery aren’t things that real adolescents avoid in general, or even that children avoid in general. They struggle with the weight of those terms, as we all do, but frequently that struggle is done positively, rather than by running away from them, or hollowing out a facade behind them. (As we see in every game that blows up a bildungsroman plot into a chosen hero saving the world; I love the Zelda series to pieces, but it bears little relation to the way responsibility plays out in my own life.)

In fact, in juvenile and adolescent literature, these concepts (especially responsibility and intellectual discovery) are often front and center. So maybe that’s a more positive way to look at the appearance of overtly juvenile games? Maybe overtly juvenile games will have a harder time pretending that they’re grown up because they have a big hero who can order other people around or kill them if those others don’t obey, and will instead have to confront responsibility in a more honest fashion? Maybe (I write just after having learned that our neighbors of six and a half years, who are closer to Miranda than anybody outside of her mother and myself, are moving to Cyprus in a week) replacing the romance subplot of your favorite RPG with the poignancy of your neighbor moving away in Animal Crossing is the first step towards a real treatment of intimacy?

Something to hope for; something to open my eyes and look for.

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random links: january 25, 2010

January 25th, 2010

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combat fatigue

January 24th, 2010

I recently replayed BioShock‘s first couple of hours as part of a VGHVI gaming session. And I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting those scenes with the perspective that I’d gained playing through the game, and gaining new insights by listening to the other participants.

But I was also sad, especially in the initial bathysphere descent. That descent is a wonderful reveal, a magical view of the city. And it’s teeming with life; much of that life is aquatic, but there are buildings glowing with lights, it looks (a few flickering neon signs aside) very much like a vibrant, functioning city.

And then you arrive, and find that matters have taken a turn for the worse; soon enough, you’re in traditional FPS mode, where everything is trying to kill you, and you’re trying to kill everything. Which, on second viewing, raised the question: with such pervasive violence, how on earth would a city under the sea continue functioning at all? Where is the power to the lights coming from, who is fixing the leaks?

I think the game largely sidesteps those questions (though, if I’m remembering correctly, we do see some Big Daddies outside doing maintenance, adding yet another twist to your slaughtering them), and I don’t claim to have answers to how the game could have been designed to avoid that. (FPSes are a known design space to work within, after all.) But I would have liked to see the game try to answer those questions, and answer them not in the form of audio diaries but in the way the gameplay was structured.

On a similar note, somebody on Twitter (whom I won’t identify here since she keeps her tweets private) commented that she wished Ico had no combat at all. And I’m sure that Shadow of the Colossus would have been much less powerful if you’d had to fight enemies while traveling between colossi instead of just being free to soak in the landscape.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against combat in games per se (though it does sound like I should try out the new Silent Hill game)—genres that focus exclusively on that (fighting games, multiplayer FPSes) have a quite pleasant singularity of purpose. But as a game starts to move away from its combat, trying instead to get me hooked on its atmosphere and the worldbuilding, I wish I could actually spend my time having the world soak in, to play with where the world came from, where it’s going, how it works. Which means, among other things, less violence or even no violence.

So it is time, I think, for the mechanics / world-building scale to tilt the other way. And I hope that, when it tilts back, the genre will have found a wider range of mechanics in the process.

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vintage game club updates

January 8th, 2010

A couple of pieces of Vintage Game Club-related news:

  • We’ve just started a playthrough of BioShock; we’ll follow this up with a playthrough of BioShock 2 when the sequel launches.
  • The less-than-vintage nature of those games accurately suggests that we’re considering changes; we’ve opened up a discussion thread where we welcome your suggestions.

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short games

January 7th, 2010

Various recent events have strongly suggested to me that I should broaden the range of games that I play. Which will, presumably, in turn broaden the range of games that I write about here.

And this, in turn, poses a bit of a problem. I imagine that I’ll be spending more time with short games than I currently do; and I’m frequently at a bit of a loss when writing about shorter games. When writing about longer games, I have some rules to guide me: only write about what specifically interests me, and don’t write something because I’m unconsciously following a review model. (I still break that last rule a lot, alas.)

At times the results are better, sometimes the results are worse; but at least I generally manage to pull off something that I’m not to embarrassed about. If I’m playing a game for ten hours, probably something will catch my eye, and I’ll be able to link that to something else that I’ve been thinking about. If I’m playing a game for five minutes, though, that may well not happen.

And, of course, if it really doesn’t happen, that’s fine: I try to write about every larger-scale game that I play, but I’ve already passed over many Flash and Facebook games in silence, and I will continue to do so if nothing about them catches my eye. The harder case, though, is what to do about games for which something does catch my eye, but where I’m having a harder time putting that something into a broader context. I’m really not sure what to do in such situations; maybe I’ll experiment with a more impressionistic approach, but I’m not sure I can pull that off well.

Also, some of the reasons for consciously avoiding review tropes won’t necessarily hold in this case. In particular, if I’m playing a game from a traditional publisher, I can be quite confident that it’s easy to find many other people who have done a much better job than I could of giving a general overview of the game. Whereas, for smaller games, it’s not so clear to me that that’s the case. (Though that could have more to do with the tunnel vision in my choice of sites to read than anything else.) Having written that, it’s not clear to me that that it’s important to give an overview of such games: if a game is a click away in your browser, and only takes ten minutes to finish, then there’s not much point in my writing anything beyond what will get appropriate readers to click on that link, aside from my personal perspective.

(One thing I will certainly try to avoid doing in the future is apologizing when I don’t feel I’m writing well about a game. I should either write or not write; either is fine, but there’s no point doing the one and acting like I should be doing the other.)

I’m looking forward to this. And, unusually for me, I’m kind of wishing that I had a Windows PC to broaden my choice of possible games. (I have a VirtualBox installation, but it has some serious sound problems and can’t run recent games.) I’m not wishing that enough to actually go out and get one, but I may well set up Boot Camp on the next Mac I buy.

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games that have stuck

January 2nd, 2010

Every year brings with it its collection of lists of top N games; I mostly enjoy reading them, though I have misgivings about their existence, but I’m not very well positioned to create one myself.

This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: while part of me finds that sort of ranking ridiculous, at least the passage of time gives some amount of distance. And there’s also the pleasure of being reminded of an old friend that you haven’t thought about for a while.

But I don’t really want to write one of those, either, for various reasons. Instead, I’ll present you with a different list, or rather three different lists. I’m not going to say anything about the games here, though many of them are good candidates for me to replay and say more about in the future. I’m sure there are many other games created over the decade that are as good or better than these, and even other games that I’ve played over the decade that are as good or better; there are not, however, other games that I’ve played that have grabbed me in such a deep and direct fashion.

First: games that have lodged into my soul. These are games where I shudder when I see them, that filter up from my brain at unexpected moments.

Next, games that delight: games that bring a smile to my face just thinking of them.

And finally, a trio of games that, in their own ways, try to push onto both of the above lists.

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noby noby boy

December 31st, 2009

I’m really not sure what to say about Noby Noby Boy. Coming in, I was aware that it’s more of a toy than a game, that you have to make your own goals. Which I did (and, eventually spent some time trying out the goals associated to the game’s trophies), which was pleasant enough, but ultimately not particularly fulfilling.

At least making and accomplishing the goals wasn’t. The process of trying to accomplish them was more satisfying, however, in its own way. Even when you’re trying to accomplish something in Noby Noby Boy, you’re not really doing much: you’re holding the two thumbsticks in opposite directions while stretching, or you’re waiting for people to jump on your back, or you’re eating with one end and, optionally, pooping out the other end. And it turns out that this rather soothing: I’d realize that I’d spent the last ten minutes doing almost nothing, but in a way that made me feel better rather than worse.

A peculiar toy. And, with it, I have now finished (or “finished”) two games for the PS3, for which I spent a grant total of fifteen dollars. Just another 46 games to go, and I’ll have spent as much on games as I spent on the PS3 itself! (Actually, I have bought a couple of on-disc games because of VGHVI multiplayer nights, but never mind that…)

Not too many blog posts written about the game, but there’s a rather interesting Experience Points podcast on the topic.

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random links: december 29, 2009

December 29th, 2009

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bioshock

December 27th, 2009

I was intending for BioShock to be one of the first games I played on my 360 but, well, one thing after another came up, and it took me a couple of years to get around to the game. In the mean time, it has garnered some amount of discussion, so I’m fairly sure I won’t have anything particularly novel to say on the subject, but that’s never stopped me before…

At any rate, as soon as I stepped into the entry area to Rapture and heard a slightly scratchy rendition of Beyond the Sea, I was hooked. The musical selections really are wonderful—I was going to write that it’s the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps the most with my iPod, until I realized that was patently false, but it’s right up there, and it’s definitely the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps most with the music sitting on top of my piano. And the music is just one aspect of the wonderfully nostalgic world they’ve created: I love the industrial design, the signs and artifacts that are sprinkled about. My only quibble is that the sequences of rooms often didn’t seem to fit together as a coherent three-dimensional chunk, but I can’t think of a first-person shooter that’s handled that better.

Very nice gameplay, too: I don’t like FPSes in general, and I was a bit worried that I’d be paralyzed by the choice of different plasmids; the latter didn’t happen, though, and I rather enjoyed some of the alternative gameplay mechanisms. (I’m a sucker for picture taking as a game mechanism, and the hacking minigame was pleasant enough.) And I appreciated some of the thoughtful choices the game made, e.g. not allowing me to waste my film taking pictures of enemies whose research I’d already maxed out, instead of treating film as an ammo like any other.

I could go into more detail about all of that, but, as with so many other people, all I really want to talk about is the Little Sisters. When I first heard about them and saw pictures of them in the prerelease coverage of the game (back when I actually paid attention to prerelease coverage of games!), they freaked me out enough that I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game at all. I’m largely inured to video game violence, but for whatever reason (perhaps because I have a daughter myself, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time), those pictures really hit home, and I was not at all looking forward to playing through a game with such imagery in it.

I eventually came around, and I’m glad I did. But, with that as my initial impression of the game, the thought of harvesting Little Sisters never crossed my mind. In general, I’m not very good at appreciating “moral dilemmas” in video games (sorry, BioWare), because, given a choice, I can rarely imagine following one of the options. And this game would be an example, except that there’s a third, covert choice here.

Consider: I’ve been thrust into an extremely dangerous and extremely strange world. Almost everybody I meet seems to want to kill me; there’s a voice on the radio acting nice enough, but those I encounter in the flesh are rather less pleasant. And, in the middle of all of this, there are these strange little girls, with “Big Daddies” hulking nearby; neither of them wants to hurt me, the Big Daddies protect the girls, and the girls are evidently quite fond of the Big Daddies. (Or of “Mr. Bubbles”, as they call them.)

Given this, what kind of person would kill the Big Daddies? The main answer, I think, is a psychopath: either somebody who is so amoral as not to care, or so afflicted with a sort of white man’s burden megalomania as to think they can march in and set things to right. (Without doing any of the real work that is actually involved in looking after young children in even a normal environment, let alone a murderous one.) But somehow, in this game, killing their protectors and leaving the girls with nobody to guard and care for them in a place like Rapture is supposed to be the good choice?

I assume that the game designers had some uncomfortable thoughts along the same lines, because of the way they structured the first Little Sister encounter. In that one, the Big Daddy is already dead, and you have to save the Little Sister from a splicer yourself. After which, you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.

Given this, using the magic device Tenenbaum has given you that is supposed to cure the Little Sisters is horrifically irresponsible at best; and, even if you’re tempted to do so, not stopping when the girl cries out in horror is, well, beyond my powers to describe. I felt intensely uncomfortable, but of course the game doesn’t give you a chance to stop when she complains. (Incidentally, when rescuing Little Sisters here and over the course of the game, l Iearned something about how I act when I’m uncomfortable: every single time I rescued a Little Sister and heard those protests, I raised my left arm and scratched the back of my head. What a bizarre tic, I’m not sure I wanted to learn of its existence.) Stopping when confronted with the choice would have been conceivable, but I’m almost positive that the game wouldn’t have let me continue without doing something to the first Little Sister. (And, in the extremely unlikely case that it would have let me proceed, I’m also sure it wouldn’t have let me actually look after her.)

And, once you’ve rescued the first Little Sister, she thanks you, setting you on the slope to further evil: the next time you meet one, she’s with her Big Daddy, but you can rationalize (given all the other murder you’re committing in the game) killing her protector, because the end result is for her own good, right? (It is, of course, for your own good, but we’ll have to construct some sort of rationalization that goes beyond that.) Which I dutifully did because the game expected that of me—given that I wasn’t going to stop playing the game, I decided to go along with its design—but doing so broke my heart every time. (As did seeing a Big Daddy alone later on in that same level—in retrospect, watching a video, it wasn’t the Big Daddy protecting the first Little Sister I’d rescued, but that’s how I interpreted it at the time. Even if you accept that rescuing the Little Sisters is best for them, how can you justify killing their surrogate fathers while doing so?) Unlike with the first Little Sister I assume that it is possible to avoid killing any of the later Big Daddies; if I were more given to alternative playthrough styles, trying the game that way would be very high on my list.

A powerful game, and a very good one. Though also, in its own way a very depressing one: it’s one of the pinnacles of our art form, but it devotes most of its art to exploring adolescent Randian power fantasies instead of, say, exploring a topic like what it means to be a parent. (And that final movie shows just how paint-by-numbers the game designers’ basic approach in that area seems to be.) Sigh. Maybe I should come around to Chris Hyde’s point of view and turn more of my attention elsewhere.

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