| Wednesday, March 25, 2009 |
  An Economy of Fun | 
Posted - 3/25/2009 4:55:42 PM | The average video game, as it is thought of by both mainstream culture and even most gamers, is a heavily-authored gameplay experience with a discrete beginning, end, and climaxes strewn haphazardly about. At this point in the life of the video game, gamers are essentially conditioned to think of games as self-explanatory adventures with a very specific premise, purpose, and linearity. On a fundamental level, the way that gamers approach progression and purpose in a game like Call of Duty 4 is the same way that gamers did back in the mid-1980s as a pudgy plumber tasked with saving a princess. In Call of Duty 4, the set of tools will change from mission to mission, but the player will continue along a carefully-scripted path with intent and focus until that mission's terrorist princess is found and rescued/executed. This method of game design essentially keeps the gameplay bound to the whims of a script or plot, but it provides its players with very well-crafted and well-paced entertainment.
The gaming industry has taken a number of its cues from film. This is not a slight (in the slightest); as an initial influence for narrative form, gameplay pacing, and general presentation, the role of movies have played a significant part in the development of video games. A number of the industry's most popular and enjoyable titles have a great deal of cinematic qualities to them, one of which is the Call of Duty series. Call of Duty has always given players very tightly-designed set piece battles interspersed with in-character/perspective narratives in a manner which, for the very first title in the series, seemed heavily influenced by HBO's Band of Brothers miniseries. Then there are games like Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy and forthcoming Heavy Rain which place the foundation of their game design on emulating the experience of cinema through a very limited and constrained set of player actions. These games are, quite literally, interactive movies that ideally take the best aspect of a movie and combine it with the most enjoyable features of a video game. In practice, these games are typically interesting for a single play-through (if that) and allow for minimally-interactive gameplay over a sub-par cinematic experience.
  
Emergent gameplay is a game design methodology which severs the gameplay management power of narrative, making a video game and its narrative presentation more in line with the benefits of an interactive medium. It is a method of game development which allows game designers and developers to craft a game world and a set of rules and constraints by which a player's actions are governed. The thought (and hope) is that a unique and consistently fresh and interesting game will spring within the game world from the mechanics by which it is governed. The impetus for this is that a game which is governed by its mechanics (and maybe its micro-narratives) is one which serves to empower its players and inspire creativity through experiment. This stands in stark contrast to having the will of a designer govern the path and intent of the player on a situation-to-situation basis, an emergent or open game design places the player within a world to define and experience their own fun.
A game which is wholly designed around the power of dynamism and emergent mechanics is one where a player is his own gameplay experience director; a player manages pace, narrative, difficulty, and any number of other components which make up the specific game. The game's designers abandon total authorship in favor of promoting interaction through player creativity and experimentation. In order to make this methodology work, though, a given game must have a thorough system of game mechanics which has the ability to actively promote and encourage player interaction in meaningful ways while dynamically balancing the game world. It is, in a sense, an economy or ecosystem of "fun." It's an approach to game design which results in a true gaming sandbox, turning the game into what is classically understood to be a "toy" rather than a video game. The difference between these two terms can be seen as nothing more than a linguistic bait-and-switch, but there are some who consider the contrast to be a legitimate differentiation: a video game is a game which provides discrete objectives in a traditionally authored manner and a toy is an interactive sandbox with "no real point."
Labeling a video game as a toy (which often seems to be used in a derogatory sense) then leads to the informed sect of the gaming mass asking: where's the game? This is a question that serves as a plague for the existence of truly open-ended games like Keita Takahashi's recent Noby Noby Boy. Noby Noby Boy, quite literally, gives its players a playground in which gamers can just experience the game mechanics working in harmony with each and the game world as a whole. If you're unfamiliar with the game, I suggest watching a random person play around with the game (the game's site is unique as well). It's almost completely incomprehensible, but it's clear that that the game has some sort of ecosystem in which the player is an agent of... destruction? The purpose and intention of the player's character erm--thing is left entirely up to the player's discretion. Noby Noby Boy is, in this sense, one of the truest examples of a dynamic, emergent game design; however, there is no proper economy of gameplay mechanics. It's a playground where there is no repercussion for player wrong-doing, no presented reasoning for advancement, no rewards for experimentation beyond the absurdity of the basic situation; in short, there is no real reason to play or continue playing Noby Noby Boy. And that's a problem.
Video games aren't toys, but video gaming as an entertainment medium already present players with a number of toy-like qualities such as the promotion of player creativity and experimentation such as the kind of player ingenuity that flourishes in the confines of something like Spore's creature creator. Games can also provide an open playground for entertainment like the aforementioned Noby Noby Boy or, for an example that is representative of the traditionally-held notion of a video game, Real Time World's Crackdown. The problem lies with the fact that video games are not toys. Toys are something that are real, persistent, easily accessible, and provide an instant gratification and tactile response for people. People of all ages are drawn to the allure of toys, especially ones which inherently promote creativity such as LEGO and Play-Doh; there is no complex instruction manual (unless you're going for a specific LEGO model) or no confusing interfaces or control mechanisms, the toy is just there for playing. Games have no such luxury of simply existing in our common, shared physical space; they're complex pieces of software that are designed to be as entertaining as possible but typically have a high barrier of entry in terms of console or PC hardware, monitor or television, controller or keyboard/mouse, and the actual twenty-to-sixty dollar game itself. And after all of this, it's not enough for a game to simply present itself as a toy.
Where the completely open-ended gameplay of Noby Noby Boy went wrong is in its inability to present its players with meaning, purpose, and profundity. This is an area where the cinematic influences in video games have very positively influenced game design: the message model of meaning. Constructing a game world governed by the most well-balanced system of mechanics and then filling it with all manner of interesting micro-narratives will mean absolutely nothing on its own. A player can approach that world with no semblance of emotion or purpose and subvert the intention of every developer and designer on that hypothetical game's development team because that player has no reason to willingly submit himself to the game or become immersed in its world. It's in following a cinematic method of storytelling, then, that games have squeezed out their model of narrative presentation. Which is a topic unto itself, but the notable aspect for this piece is the way that cinematic storytelling imbues meaning on a player's actions in games.
Consider Naughty Dog's recent Playstation 3-exclusive action/adventure game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. In a lot of ways, it's a very safe, by-the-books game. It has a scruffy-looking and witty main character, his older and more experienced wise-cracking sidekick, and a cute and precocious romantic interest. In this game, the trio are involved in a multi-locale trek to uncover the secret of Sir Francis Drake's fortune and the whole story has this very Indiana Jones-like atmosphere and whimsy to it (despite the main character killing thousands of people over the course of the day). What was remarkable about Uncharted was not its plot or its gameplay, but rather it was the game's ability to infuse its entire cast of characters with more personality than most games ever approach for even a single lead character. Every cut scene in Uncharted was a reward for the player completing a segment of gameplay and these cut scenes expounded on the life and depth of each character in such a way as to continually build upon each character's meaning and contribution to the game. Every time a cut scene aired in the game, the player was drawn a bit more into the world of Uncharted through the game's leading man and woman. And when the player is drawn more to his in-game avatar, every in-game action is more impacting, every scenario is more meaningful and understandable, and the integrity of the game design is strengthened.
At this point, the goal becomes allowing for the creation of an open-ended game with its emphasis placed on the emergent scenarios produced by its game design to reflect the same sense of meaning and purpose in its dynamic sandbox as a game as heavily authored as Uncharted. To a large extent, Maxis had a great deal of success with The Sims series in this regard. The Sims games are primarily sandbox gaming experiences that charge players with the sole goal of running a successful household of sims. These games have the mechanics to promote a game design which consists of surprisingly deep strategy gameplay while simultaneously allowing players to treat the game as nothing more than a high-tech doll house. The Sims manages to create exigent circumstances solely through the nature of its source material: if there's something that every gamer in the world understands, it's the pressing needs and minutiae of the daily life of a human being.
  
The Sims fosters the kinds of player narratives that, as of now, are the most intriguing form of narrative to be told within the gaming medium. That is, if we as game developers don't want to rely on the method of storytelling dictated by years of film and cinema, then fueling a dynamic narrative that is left up to a player's interpretation may be the best option. With the exception of maybe a really well-done cut scene here and there, the most memorable aspect of games that players tend to take away are of the "scored the winning goal in the last remaining seconds" variety. These are stories that players can construct from in-game events and mechanics that may or may not line up with what a design would expect a player to experience. In a game like The Sims, a designer would anticipate a player growing attached to one of his sims and then that sim dying from a chance oven explosion in the kitchen. What a designer may not necessarily expect, and what a player would potentially find endlessly hilarious and intriguing, is that a player can starve a sim to death by isolating a sim from the rest of the family and then going into building mode and build walls around that sim and isolate him from the in-game resources and social growth he needs to survive.
If only it was simple to "open up" existing game genres and fill them with an economy of self-balancing game mechanics. Far Cry 2, for example, has some of the most brilliantly designed and implemented combat I've seen in a video game in years. Players are given their tools of destruction and then are, in the short term, tasked with the elimination of enemies. The game populates the world with various factors: grass, huts, ammo depots, propane tanks, and so on. The way that combat unfolds is dependent on all of the game's mechanics working together to create a dynamic, unpredictable combat scenario that generates a player narrative that is a combination of what the game's designers intended and what the net yield of the system of game mechanics created while the player worked to resolve the combat situation. And as well as Far Cry 2 worked to create these emergent gameplay experiences, the game took an enormous development team years to create; over it's forty-three months of development, the team size peaked at 65 people for year one, 105 for year two, and an astonishing peak of 268 individuals for the third and final year of the game's development.
  
Does an emergent game design work on both a small and a large level? Noby Noby Boy, despite its inability to create intent and purpose, works as a very well-designed playground where its players can just experiment with a working ecosystem of mechanics. As this model of game progression scales upwards, though, the challenge in properly developing, balancing, and testing is sure to rise at a far faster rate than that of a more traditional game.
Putting the reality of development complexity and cost aside, the real question becomes: do players really want the power (responsibility?) to play a game and determine what they find fun within a given playground? Video gaming's adoption of a cinematic flair for storytelling has led to games which possess a number of movie-like qualities, but no one would ever argue that a game like Call of Duty 4 is bad or not enjoyable because of it. For the high price of an average game, though, we should be offering players more than a heavily-authored single-player campaign that is only interesting for one play-through.
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| Resident Evil 5 | 
Posted - 3/19/2009 2:36:28 PM | In Resident Evil 4 there is this great feeling that you're going to have to face an enormous giant (El Gigante) as you explore one particular area of the game. Eventually, El Gigante makes his appearance in the middle of a rainy night filled with thunderstorms. As Leon Kennedy runs from tiny shack to tiny shack, each one being swept effortlessly aside by El Gigante, the player begins to contemplate the futility of shooting this enormous, hulking monster with a pistol.
In Resident Evil 5, El Gigante appears once again. This time around, Chris lets loose with his mounted machine gun while Sheva unleashed a torrent of bullets with her minigun. Both characters are confined to these Jeep-mounted turrets and cannot move. Dodging El Gigante's atacks is now a mere quick-time event.
  
The Resident Evil series has been a mainstay of the game industry since the original Resident Evil was released for the Playstation in 1996. Since then, the series has spawned eight additional games (not counting remakes/re-releases), three live-action movies with Milla Jovavich (the best video game inspired movies that have been made to this point), and one awful CG animated movie. As I read up on information about the series before writing this piece, I discovered there was also a movie released in Japan in 2000 entitled Biohazard 4D-Executer. This movie had a budget of approximately $10,000. It exists on the Internet.
Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 are both considered to be the shining stars of the series' early years. The predominant method of character control in these early Resident Evil games was a model where all input was handled from the character's perspective despite the player's view being dependent on fixed, cinematic camera angles that were dependent on a given environment or scene. This worked stunningly for the time but as anyone who has played the games recently can tell you: it doesn't hold up. And Capcom realized this after the release of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Resident Evil Zero, so they gave the series a little nudge in a more modern direction with 2005's Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 was a long game, especially by the series' standards, but it was remarkable for its superb gunplay, entirely new setting, and enemies. More than any of that, though, Resident Evil 4 was a game that truly understood itself and had a pace and atmosphere that comes from such a profound understanding of its own design.
In the list of mechanics or changes that I thought Resident Evil 4 needed in order to make it a better game, you would not find any of the following: enemies with AK-47s, enemies on motorcycles, an abundance of daylight, turrets, a cover system, or a game design that placed cooperative gameplay at its forefront. Clearly, Capcom's idea of Resident Evil 5 was markedly different from my own.
The African setting for Resident Evil 5 is one which could have worked in the series' favor so well. It could have imparted feelings of loneliness, despair, and weariness with a setting of a ravaged African village filled with a not-quite-zombies-but-not-quite-people-either populace. This fictitious game could have gone for the harrowing, conflict-ridden setting that a game like Far Cry 2 chose to have, focusing on the natural beauty of the environment while, at the same time, letting its inherent danger and desolation be the primary atmospheric qualities that are never explicitly called out.
  
The African setting for Resident Evil 5 is one which is almost entirely devoid of Africa. The introductory village (and the level or two immediately following it) are the only hints whatsoever that the game takes place in Africa. After that players are treated to an oil foundry, ancient ruins, a giant tanker out at sea, a volcano, and so on. Resident Evil 5 is a video game with a lot of sunlight, an almost entirely black cast of enemies, and very little environmental meaning or significance. The constant presence of sunlight (a big deal for the series) doesn't, by itself, diminish the atmosphere and tension of the game, it just does nothing to help the dearth of "mood" conveyed through the sorts of locales and levels that oodles of video games have done to death.
Maybe atmosphere and purpose aren't of paramount concern for Resident Evil 5. This a game that sends its players into an African village with little purpose or reason, just that a fictitious military group is staging some sort of mission there. Players are then introduced to an aggressive pair of presumably infected humans shoving a parasite into someone's mouth, then witnessing that person's transformation into an angry, angry, infected person-thing. About an hour and a half later, players are put onto the back of a vehicle, given a turret, and tasked with blowing up legions of these infected humans on motorcycle and trucks. Why am I being attacked by this enormous throng of angry, infected Africans? Why am I even progressing forward? A vacuous, video-gamey reason is later presented, but the player's motivations for progression are never particularly interesting (Resident Evil 4's storyline was far from great, but it imbued a sense of purpose and reason). Players are often ushered from one act to another and one setpiece to the next.
Resident Evil 5 also does a lot to promote a chapter-by-chapter progression method; there is no longer a mid-mission checkpoint where players can anticipate cool new items through interaction with the Resident Evil 4 item dealer ("What a'ya buyin?"/"What a'ya sellin'?"). Players are now given a very meagerly-presented inventory and item purchase screen in-between missions or after deaths instead of a neat way of integrating this gameplay mechanic with the game world. This change from RE4 to RE5 is a seemingly superficial one, but when playing the game it reinforces the chapter-by-chapter progression rather than a natural evolution of the story and gameplay. There is also less for players to look forward to mid-mission; there may be a random piece of loot or a new weapon amidst the level architecture, but there is longer the assurance in a player's mind that "Hey, there should be the item dealer guy coming up sometime soon!"
  
Despite all of these criticisms, Resident Evil 5 still has enough of what made Resident Evil 4 fun to play to end up being an enjoyable, if uninteresting, game. As a pretty big fan of Resident Evil 4, that's about the best thing that can be said about the game. The control scheme, a subject which received a great deal of flak, works excellent within the context of the game and is one of the things that makes the core gameplay unique.
There are some "unforgivable" missteps that the game makes which are not particularly interesting to talk about, but fun to condemn, though. The foremost amongst these grievances is the one bit of fuel that the control scheme folks can add to their fire. The last couple of acts in the game feature, quite predominately, average (and boss) enemies that can utilize firearms. One of these is the minigun boss from Resident Evil 4 who is a challenging opponent the first time you see him and the subject of extreme rage when he brings along his own cooperative friend for the second bout. The worst of the firearm wielding baddies, though, are the grunts who are capable of wielding AK-47s. Resident Evil 5 expects players to utilize a cheaply-implemented cover system to take out these enemies and it is at these moments that the game calls attention to the fact that the control scheme is not from Gears of War. It is during these frequent end-game battles where gamers will be, in my mind, right to chastise the inability to move while firing because that's the kind of gameplay these moments in RE5 encourage.
Resident Evil 5 is at worst when it draws attention to its attempts at recreating the memorable moments of Resident Evil 4. Or when it wants to bring more Gears of War to Resident Evil 4. In my eyes, that you can tell your friends about "that Chainsaw guy" or "that big giant dude" is the biggest criticism that can be thrown at the game. It's imitation through recreation without meaningful innovation while tossing in a constant real or AI buddy at the player's side.
Actually, no, the fact that you can tell your friends there is more than a single turret sequence in the game is the largest criticism that can be tossed at the game.
And the abundance of quick-time events.
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| The Game Industry's Twitter | |
Posted - 3/17/2009 2:43:50 PM | So, I'm on Twitter.
I'll assume for the moment that you've never heard of Twitter. First, that would mean that my mother has beaten you to knowledge of something related to technology. More to the point, though, Twitter is a service that connects people and limits communication between them to 140 characters per message -- no more. Beyond that, it's hard to find a decent explanation of what the service is actually used for.
As a result, mentioning Twitter will often yield a response best qualifies as a loathsome "Why would I care about what someone is eating for breakfast or when they are taking a shower?" Mentioning Twitter to someone familiar with the service, though, will often yield a surprisingly positive response. In my informal and completely non-empirical study, I've talked to people who have embraced Twitter as a simple, informal means of communication with people that were loathe to utilize other "revolutions" in social networking like MySpace, Facebook, and so on. The primary difference between Twitter and these other services is the informal and simplistic nature of adding new people to your feed; adding someone new isn't a major commitment, you don't have to worry about protocol for "following" them (your follow list is a list of people you'd like to see updates from). If you follow someone, unless they disable the feature, they'll get an e-mail saying that you have followed them and then that person can look at the kind of updates you write and decide for themselves if they want to reciprocate.
A quick usage note: there is a tendency for people to follow anyone who follows them out of courtesy; I recommend against this as a blind rule. As soon as you start adding people who write about what they're having for lunch or what color the sky in their neighborhood is in the morning, the usefulness, and subsequently your enjoyment, of the service will start to dissipate. Twitter's purpose is highly dependent on what you, as the user, want to make of it. If you add everyone you can in a rush to try and increase the number of people you're following with the hope that people will suddenly follow you and you will have made your experiment with the service a success, the only thing you're going to likely see is a sea of vapid and uninteresting updates from people you have no connection to.
When I started using Twitter more than a year ago, I wasn't really sure what kind of mileage I would get out of it. It was basically a service that allowed me to broadcast 140 character messages to a bunch of my friends at once. As I discovered more and more game developers, journalists, and gaming sites/outlets on Twitter, though, my feed started transforming into a legitimately useful source of up-to-the-minute news and information from all around the world. Once that started happening, my personal usage of Twitter went from a couple messages every few days to numerous messages in a single day whenever I had a few minutes at work and home depending on what I was working on, what game I was playing, what news story I just read that I wanted to comment on and share with people, and so forth. I switched from using the website to using an actual client (Twhirl and Witty are my favorites) at some point and once I did that, I had an outlet for random thoughts that I'd condense into 140 characters and broadcast to anyone who was interested. I've just been doing this almost every day for the last year, accumulating new people to follow, having new people follow me, and not only getting exposed to a bunch of really random and new stuff every day that I may not have ever seen otherwise, but casually met a whole bunch of cool people within the game industry. Examples:
A lot of these people are game industry figures that may or may not have their every comment and thought echoed by the gaming press in enormous, blinking text. They're people in the game industry who have interesting or entertaining things to say about game development, game journalism/writing, playing games, or any other random comment that they may decide to echo on Twitter. The service is a superb way to get information about facets of the game industry on a moment-by-moment basis -- as opposed to in a formal article or forum post -- from some of the less well-known figures that make up the industry. It's also a great service for having impromptu conversations, as succinct as they are forced to be by the 140 character limit, between people that may never have found out about each other if not for the loose network of individuals that forms out of usage of Twitter.
A few months ago, Sam Houston of GamerDNA decided to put together a list of game industry figures and companies that were using Twitter so that anyone interested in game industry happenings could have a one-stop location for a huge list of people and Twitter names that they could add to their personal feed. That project turned out to be such a successful idea that he ended up making a site out of it and he appears to be updating the list of people regularly. The site is: Game Industry Tweet.com.
I encourage anyone who thinks any of this sounds interesting to follow some of the individuals listed on the site. The companies and community managers that use Twitter aren't inherently less interesting, but I like to think of (and use) Twitter when the people I read updates from are not doing it as part of their job description. It's a bunch of people who, presumably, are interested in the same things that you are, and with a little bit of searching and customization, Twitter can end up being an oft-updated feed of information or thoughts from people who share your own interests.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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