Elements of Meaning

Braid: Epilogue and Star Discussion

2009-04-17T17:00:00.005-05:00

Here's the text.[1] I've used smaller bars to denote the "hidden" text, with larger bars separating books:

The boy called for the girl to follow him, and he took her hand. He would protect her; they would make their way through this oppressive castle, fighting off the creatures made of smoke and doubt, escaping to a life of freedom.
The boy wanted to protect the girl. He held her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of Manhattan. They turned and made their way toward the Canal St. subway station, and he picked a path through the jostling crowd."
His arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck. "You're burdening me with your ridiculous need," she said. Or, she said: "You're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you." In another time, another place, she said: "Stop yanking on my arm; you're hurting me!"
He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.
Ghostly, she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. "I am here," she said. "I am here. I want to touch you." She pleaded: "Look at me!" But he would not see her; he only knew how to look at the outside of things.

He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. Through these clues he would find the Princess, see her face. After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder's glass up to his eyes and waited.

On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World...[1]

Someone near him said: "It worked."

Someone else said: "Now we are all sons of bitches."
She stood tall and majestic. She radiated fury. She shouted: "Who has disturbed me?" But then, anger expelled, she felt the sadness beneath; she let her breath fall softly, like a sigh, like ashes floating gently on the wind.

She couldn't understand why he chose to flirt so closely with the death of the world.

The candy store. Everything he wanted was on the opposite side of that pane of glass. The store was decorated in bright colors, and the scents wafting out drove him crazy. He tried to rush for the door, or just get closer to the glass, but he couldn't. She held him back with great strength. Why would she hold him back? How might he break free of her grasp? He considered violence.
They had been here before on their daily walks. She didn't mind his screams and his shrieks, to the way he yanked painfully on her braid to make her stop. He was too little to know better.

She picked him up and hugged him: "No, baby," she said. He was shaking. She followed his gaze toward treats sitting on pillows behind the glass: the chocolate bar and the magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so many other things, deeper inside. "Maybe when you're older, baby," she whispered, setting him back on his feet and leading him home, "Maybe when you're older."

Every day thereafter, as before, she always walked him on a route that passed in front of the candy store.
He cannot say he understood all of this. Possibly he's more confused now than ever. But all these moments he's contemplated--something has occurred. The moments feel substantial in his mind, like stones. Kneeling, reaching down toward the closest one, running his hand across it, he finds it smooth, and slightly cold.

He tests the stone's weight; he finds he can lift it, and the others too. He can fit them together to create a foundation, and embankment, a castle.

To build a castle of appropriate size, he will need a great many stones. But what he's got, now, feels like an acceptable start.

Since Tim's perceptions were re-calibrated at the end of World 1, things work a bit differently. For starters, there are now not only green books (which no longer display text), but also red books (which display two sets of text each). The green books, in fact, now actively reduce knowledge, as they close any open red books.

Red books do double-duty. If the player "hides" Tim behind a screen element (such as a rock), a female vocal tone is played and the text changes. The revealed text is written in italics above. After all this about self-refection (which continues in the texts), it's interesting that players get to see more information when Tim is (quite literally) out of the picture.

That's really all there is to the gameplay of this section. The stars provide more gameplay, so I'll spend some time on those as well.

Throughout the game are scattered the dim outlines of eight star shapes. The player can choose to collect these in order to change the ending in world 1-4. Frankly, I'm not a completionist gamer. Such dedication to a victory beyond beating the game tends to trouble me. I have, however, looked into walk-through text and video explaining how each star can be obtained.

Bluntly, a two-hour process almost entirely comprised of waiting seems more than simply unappealing. It seems a clear indication of irrational pursuit of a goal on the part of the player. I'd dismiss this as personal opinion if the rest of the story weren't so focused on obsession and regret. One star (World 3) isn't attainable if the player has already assembled the puzzle pieces, which seems to turn my feelings around on themselves and cast those who don't get distracted by stars as the true zealots. I'll leave it for the reader to decide who's less emotionally healthy, but the same issues of obsession/focus and reflection/regret are at play in either case.

There is a star-collecting dynamic beyond changing the ending. The collected stars form the constellation Andromeda. I've been down the rabbit hole of trying to interpret that, but I'm not sure I came up with anything beyond the obvious "damsel in distress" stuff, and that falls outside the purview of this series anyway.

1I transcribed this as best I could, but there may be some typos. It was struggle enough not to change the punctuation and capitalization to fit AP style. :)

Unrelated notes and errata:

The block colors correspond to worlds (a decent key to them can be found in the ladder.) Is there meaning in the arrangement of the blocks (as levels)?

Does the location of the stars have meaning?

Braid: World 1

2009-04-17T12:19:00.003-05:00

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Play it for me, Sam, for old time's sake.

Level Titles:

1-1: (none)
1-2: (none)
1-3: (none)
1-4: Braid

At a cafe on a bright plaza, most customers sit back, feeling the warmth of the sun, enjoying their cold drinks. But not Tim--he barely notices the sun, doesn't really taste his coffee. For him this corner affords a good view of the city, and in the teeterings of the passers-by, in the arc of a shop-girl's hand as she displays tea to an interested gentleman, Tim hopes to see clues.
That night at the cinema, fictitious adventurers lunge implausibly across the screen. The audience here is mixed. Some are patrons of the cafe, now sitting excitedly in the plush chairs, eager for another new flavor, for distraction from the boredom of their easy lives. Other seats hold fisherman and farm workers, hoping to forget their toils and rest their hands.
Tim is here too, but he is scrutinizing the gloss on the lips on the screen, measuring the angle of the plume of a distant helicopter crash. He thinks he discerns a message; when the cinema closes and most of the audience strolls down the plaza to the South, Tim goes North.
People like Tim seem to live oppositely from the other residents of the city. Tide and riptide, flowing against each other.
Tim wants, like nothing else, to find the Princess, to know her at last. For Tim this would be momentous, sparking an intense light that embraces the world, a light that reveals the secrets long kept from us, that illuminates--or materializes!--a final palace where we can exist in peace.

But how would this be perceived by the other residents of the city, in the world that flows contrariwise? The light would be intense and warm at the beginning, but then flicker down to nothing, taking the castle with it; it would be like burning down the place we've always called home, where we played so innocently as children. Destroying all hope of safety, forever.

I note first of all that the doors to the levels open in reverse order now, from right to left. This plays in with the opposed time currents as introduced in the book texts ("People like Tim seem to live oppositely from the other residents of the city. Tide and riptide, flowing against each other.") The player perceives that World 1's time flows opposite the usual direction. Through the murky, magical connection of the "player-character," the player's perception of time shows Tim's backwards perception of his environs. The opposed time flows illustrate Tim's insanity/genius (they are, after all, but a step apart), but the opposed time currents also set up the big reveal at the end of the World.

There are no new mechanics here. The dynamics have changed, however. Now, Tim doesn't seem to kill Goombas by landing on them. Since their time flows the opposite direction, Tim can even revive dead Goombas if they touch his feet (make of that what thou wilt). The puzzles now become about reviving Goombas and bouncing off them multiple times in order to gain greater height.

It is interesting to see levels 1-1 through 1-3 in reverse. Tim's reversed actions might be expected to have the normal effects of Worlds 2-6, but they do not. Goombas jumped on and bounced off in reverse would still be landed on, and still thus die in reverse. Instead, they're only vulnerable to map elements (e.g., spike pits -- which I can't claim flow in either direction time-wise, and which still kill Tim). I could write this inconsistency off as a limitation of the game's design, but that's not really what close reading is about. Rather, I interpret this as a signal that Tim's world is not merely a reversed ("backwards") version of reality. The reveal at the end of 1-4 makes it plain that Tim's perceptions are warped.

On the world numbering system:

The flipped and skewed perception of Tim in World 1 coincides with the notion that Tim's "progress" through the worlds was, in fact, a march back towards the beginning. This is not inconsistent with the themes of regret and self-analysis that I've discussed in previous posts on Braid. 1-4: Braid is the core of Tim's problems. Tim, in a sense, knew this all along, but the full(er) truth isn't revealed until after Tim has worked out all his previous puzzles.

Some aesthetic notes I jotted:

For some reason WASD keys are laid out as if on a keyboard, on a shelf above the toilet. There's also a highlighted Z key to the right. Ctrl+Z = undo.

Attic has movie projector, desk with desklamp shining on head sculpture).

Door images (4 of them) show a budding flower, in stages.

We're obviously dealing with symbolism here: The Princess had a car parked in the front of her house, and got rescued by a knight.

Braid World 6: Hesitance

2009-04-16T20:43:00.004-05:00

It's called "Hesitance" and I've dallied months since I last did a Braid post. Um -- Get it?

Perhaps in a perfect world, the ring would be a symbol of happiness. It's a sign of a ceaseless devotion: even if he will never find the Princess, he will always be trying. He still will wear the ring.

But the ring makes its presence known. It shines to others like a beacon of warning. It makes people sow to approach. Suspicion, distrust. Interactions are torpedoed before Tim can open his mouth.

In time he learns to deal with others carefully. He matches their hesitant pace, tracing a soft path through their defenses. But this exhausts him, and it only works to a limited degree. It doesn't get him what he needs.

Tim begins to hide the ring in his pocket. But he can hardly bear it--too long tucked away, that part of him might suffocate.

Levels:

6-1 The Pit?

6-2 There and Back Again

6-3 Phase?

6-4 Cascade

6-5 Impassable Foliage

6-6 Elevator Action

6-7 In Another Castle

Here's where the ring mechanic comes into play. Put simply, hitting "Y" (on the 360) deploys a ring. That ring creates a circular area that slows everything moving within it. Though that circle is mostly shown on-screen, the slowing effect tapers off outside the drawn boundary. The overall diameter of the effected area is perhaps one-third as wide as the screen.

The ring can be deployed anywhere Tim can get, follows the normal rules of time rewinding (even if Tim is on a green slab making him immune to time rewinding around him, the ring will disappear and return to Tim when it would otherwise), and automatically returns to Tim at the beginning of a new level. The ring is used in order to slow plants, Goombas, cannonballs, Tim, and slowly closing portculli. The ring is a necessary puzzle piece, but it's also useful to time tricky jumps. Ultimately, it's an isolating mechanism, used to create or maintain space.

As much as there's obvious meaning in the ring causing hesitance (I know time seemed to slow down for me when I was shopping for engagement rings), my intention in this series is to focus on the mechanics and dynamics of Braid. If I'm to stick with the theme of self-analysis, then the ring mechanic exemplifies how figuring things out inside our own minds sometimes necessitates not only slowing things down, but also isolating problems both to focus on the problems and to focus elsewhere with less distraction.

Ending dinosaur monologue:

It took you so long to get here!
But at long last, I can tell you that...
The Princess must be in another castle.
I've never met her...
Are you sure she exists?

March BoRT: Translation, Ambiguity, and Restrictive Definitions of Genre and Medium

2009-03-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

Looks like the end of the month has come and I haven't posted anything again. Well, at least there's time to answer this month's Blogs of the Round Table prompt.

I normally try to make my Round Table entries as much a conversation with other entries as possible, though I fear there will be less cross-linking this time around due to the inherent introspection of the prompt.

The Choice of Subject

About the Author: This month's topic turns the literary focus from the medium to the author. If you submitted a post to either the January or February topics, feel free to write about the process you underwent in converting literary themes into gameplay. Did you struggle with anything in particular? Are you satisfied that your game design(s) communicated what you intended? Have subsequent comments or idea made you wish you could go back and start he process over? And how much does your design say about you and your own interpretation of the themes of the source material?

In January, I struggled to choose a source text. I don't have a "favorite" text to begin with, but that was not my main concern. My main concern was that I didn't feel I could adequately transpose the multiple interpretations and potential meanings of any of the texts that came to my mind. I felt that, rather than translate the plot of a story, or a particular dynamic from within a narrative, the notion of imagining a text written originally as a game rather than a novel, play, poem, or the like was a notion that properly centered around the larger meanings, metaphors, and conceits of the work.

Were I to transpose Hamlet given the prompt, I would have to encompass all the various possible interpretations of Hamlet's apparent sanity, his doubt and inaction, his unclear feelings for Ophelia, and all the other questions that fall between the words in the folio and the actual intentions and thoughts of the characters. While there are certainly many acting troupes willing to pick one interpretation and perform it, I both was too cowardly to make such a stand and too principled to simplify the ingeniously elusive "true meaning" of the text itself.

While I tend to treasure that sort of ambiguity in extant works that employ it, ambiguity is not an intrinsic aspect of any medium or genre. I have problems with authority figures, though.

Genre, Medium, and Game Design as Restriction of Potential Fabulae

... There are a handful of games where the “author” can clearly be heard through the work. How closely tied is this to the thematic content of the games and how exactly did they communicate these themes to their audience? And should they have, or should video game designer try to remain out of their work, allowing the player to establish their own themes through gameplay?

This can be (and has been) interpreted as a question about the mechanical and narrative freedom of the player-character — whether games should be designed to allow more choices for the protagonist.This can also be seen as a question of Auteur Theory and the Intentional Fallacy. Roger Travis took a look at that debate, and I plan to address a similar issue soon.

Were Shakespeare to have written a game about a stone, I would hope that stone would be as slippery to the grasp as are his characters -- as difficult to discern as the relative popularity of each of Frost's two paths in the wood.

Meaning is derived from the experience of a game, as something of an indirect conversation between designers and player, by way of the various elements of the game. Neither the player not the designer can fully dictate meaning without the other's cooperation. Corvus has talked plenty about a similar idea in his posts on fabula. A game's design may focus or restrict the potential fabulae, but it cannot force a singular fabula on the player. The difference between an auteur such as Will Wright and one such as Hideo Kojima is a question of how tightly they focus the player's choice of fabula via the frequency, quality, or quantity of volition offered to the player's character. Games take various extremes in these areas. See, for example: Fallouts, Far Cry 2, BioWare ethics spectrums, I.R.P., and the Metal Gear Solid series.

I'm no purest of genre. I won't walk into a concert and deride the band as insufficiently "metal" or "not punk enough." If Mike Ness wants to cover country songs, then he's free to see where that road leads. I'll follow and judge for myself in my usual, detached fashion. Some poems or songs read like manifestos, while others seem to passionately avoid making a point. Likewise, if a game designer wants to build a game that's more direct and unambiguous about meaning, that's dandy. I'm no didact in these matters.

"But," you might say, "the debate concerning the media-blending of film and game in titles like Metal Gear Solid 4 or Bourne Conspiracy isn't a debate about genre bending, it's a debate about media blending." To that I say that medium, like genre, can largely be seen as a set of generalities and audience expectations, none of which are contractually binding. If a "film" allows for interactivity or presents a static image, I will not deem the work a failure, but evaluate it in light of those deviances from the expectations associated with the mediums blended.

Blogs of the Round Table: Dr. Jekyll and Miss Bennet (2/2)

2009-02-28T22:30:00.002-06:00

February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the proposed game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Disclaimer: For starters, I'm no AAA game designer. I'm much more about the ideas and theories behind games as a medium. I'm not designing game concepts with the goal of making popular products.

I got back from my D&D session early enough that it looks like I might beat the buzzer for a second post today. (I never promised regularity--I hope.) You can find part one of thie post here: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Without further ado, I'd like to build on Chris Bateman's take ("Wii and Wonderment") on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that he posted over on his International Hobo blog.

Wii and Wonderment:

While I'm struck initially that Pride and Prejudice was a story about the frustrations of interacting and getting along through and in spite of the social conventions and mores of Victorian England, I also realize that this month's prompt specifically cautions bloggers against looking at the primary text. Beyond that, I also understand that the frustrations were largely on the part of the characters that had not yet mastered the mechanics of the social game (though sometimes on the part of those who had thought themselves competent, only to see that the rules may be changing).

Chris' Austenian proposal was based around a simple dichotomy in the interface. At a given moment, the player could decide whether to react politely or rudely. The fun was in the discovery of how those choices would be acted out. It truly does sound like a very fun game.

It struck me, though, that Chris' game shares some elements of the frustration-harnessing in the recent Minotaur China Shop. What makes Wii and Wonderment more than a reskinned China Shop is that element of discovery and fun that comes from vague inputs and concrete results (not only is the result explicitly judged as good or bad manners, but the nearby NPCs react accordingly). The level of abstraction of "A = polite interaction, B = impolite interaction" provides the joy of anticipation and discovery that we not only see in Mass Effect's (admittedly imperfectly implemented) dialog system, but also in infant toys that play farm animal sounds when animals are touched.

A second difference between China Shop and Wii and Wonderment is that the frustration comes from a different place. Where China Shop's frustration is largely a result of the intentionally clumsy controls, Wii and Wonderment's controls are simple but elegant (hopefully--that may be a task for the polishing later on in development). Instead, Wii and Wonderment causes frustration for the player in that the rules aren't entirely clear. Sometimes it's acceptable to be impolite. Some players may even prefer it. Like in the original text, this isn't necessarily made clear until the fallout from a choice (which I think is wonderful--too many games seem to take pains to flag choices as "good" or "bad").

While it certainly is true that Jane Austen built settings and plots around nuanced models of social mores, the videogame version Chris proposes uses that same idea. I feel I'd be remiss in noting that the proposed game, like the original text, teaches the audience a fair bit about how to navigate the rough waters of social interaction. Elizabeth Bennet is, among other things, an outsider brought into a game that never offers her an instruction manual. In that respect, Miss Bennet's entrance to polite society reflects Noby Noby Boy's unintuitive and obfuscated controls.

But Noby Noby Boy is a game about having fun while learning the mechanics. Since Wii and Wonderment is a game about learning and experimenting with the rules of social interaction, I wonder if that aspect of learning could be pushed into a more educational form. Of course I don't mean moving to Oregon Trail or Number Munchers here. I mean a game that could help introduce players to new cultures.

The Wii and Wonderment idea could be extrapolated to help young adults or socially inept players to have a safe place to play and experiment as a transition to mainstream adult society. It could help internet trolls and SeanBaby fans become accustomed to civilized conversation. It could be bundled with language programs to teach cultural literacy through virtual immersion.

I realize that, if done poorly, this design could be just another dating simulation. If done well, though, this game could expand social simulations in a new useful direction.

Check out the other Blogs of the Round Table entries:

Blogs of the Round Table: Dr. Jekyll and Miss Bennet

2009-02-28T07:34:00.012-06:00

Disclaimer: For starters, I'm no AAA game designer. I'm much more about the ideas and theories behind games as a medium. I'm not designing game concepts with the goal of making popular products.

In my usual way, I've sat on notes for blog posts for ~~far too long~~ just long enough. Again, this means that I'm going to give you two different discussions. If Corvus will let me, I'll consider splitting them into two posts. I'm not really here to pad my post count, though. I'm here to ... Well, forget that for a moment; it's time for Mr. Hyde!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

Josh Bycer at Chronic Game Designer also put up an omnibus Round Table post last month. In that post, he put forward an idea for a game based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. To wit:

My game will deal with the issue of allowing your dark side full reign and not having to worry about guilt or remorse. ... Similar to the GTA series you will have a threat level which measures how much destruction you're doing, however it will go away when you transform back to Jekyll. At the start you can choose when to transform between the two ... however eventually you will lose control ... . I would also like to show how Jekyll loses control over Hyde as eventually you'll be required to perform X amount of illegal acts to appease Hyde to try and force a transformation back. ... You can possibly get away with it Scott free which should be interesting.

Maybe it's because I've been playing Clint Hocking's Far Cry 2, but I'm intrigued by the notion of the player losing control and being forced to act contrary to the ethics that had previously governed the player-character actions. Far Cry 2, modelled in the tradition of Joe Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, puts players in a position where they have to do a number of horrible things to progress the plot. The motivation in Far Cry 2 works like that of BioShock's post-reveal play: As in the original Super Mario Bros., you're only moving forward because that's the only option you're given, other than choosing to lose or to quit.

The genius of Bioshock's revelation was that this game built around notions of choice and volition robbed the player of agency at a crucial moment, and revealed a flaw in previous conceptions of player choice. The surprise necessary to making that scene so powerful, however, may be spent for now; gamers will be on the lookout for that trick and see it coming, just as "art games" have gotten to the point where "The only winning move is not to play" is bordering on [spoiler link!] cliche.

Side note: I'm open to the idea of making the initial potion-drinking a choice that could lead to an immediate ending, should the player refuse to experiment. It wouldn't be the "best" ending, though: Jekyll was partially trying to become a better person and partially attempting to advance science. both of those goals would not be achieved if the player doesn't drink.

But Jekyll and Hyde aren't going to surprise anyone, anyway. Like many games these days, it's about fate, player agency, and volition. While I can understand giving the player control of Hyde at first, I think that more could be done by slowly sapping that volition from the player over time. There are a few options for this.

The first option is to involve a second player, but with an obfuscated connection, as in Jason Rohrer's Between. Part of what made Between interesting was that it wasn't clear to what extent the two players were or could interact. The bestial/civilized dichotomy in this game is largely about learning to mediate and control those often opposed personalities. This struggle is a common story in human development, and often is no more clear than groping in the darkness to find matches. Involving a second player (or at least some deliberately obfuscated mechanics, in which the results are temporally and narratively removed from the causes) could be a great way to model this human struggle.

Instead of a second player, Hyde's later actions could be generated based on the prior acts of the player. Hyde's player-directed actions could be extrapolated in length and savageness as the player loses control. The choices the player makes as Jekyll could also change Hyde. If Jekyll tries to be even more meek, reverent, or demure, Jekyll could react more violently. Jekyll could understand Hyde's attempts to reverse the potion and respond by resisting transitioning back to Hyde.

I suppose the game needs a goal. I've considered multiple endings, but it seems that there can only be three: Hyde wins, Jekyll wins, or somehow they learn to coalesce. I think that list probably sits in order of raising "reward" responses (e.g., the game makes the player feel more accomplished by conquering Hyde than for letting Hyde run amok). There may also be a chance that both lose via Hyde being captured or killed by the Bill.

Jekyll can make three "classes" of actions toward the goals. He can try to become less wild in his own life, seeking atonement, cutting his vices, etc; he can seek to "defeat" Hyde by reversing the effects of the potion through research and time in the lab; or he can seek to communicate with his wild side, by partaking in physical activities, going out drinking, or maybe even pursuing romantic interest (with potentially wild cut scenes).

Difficulty settings could be employed, but ultimately, the difficulty comes from the basis Mr. Hyde starts from. The meaner he is at the beginning, the less time Jekyll will have to come to a conclusion before Hyde "wins." In this way, the player may come to understand and regret earlier choices, which is a part of the learning process.

Part Two: Pride, Prejudice, and the Minotaur's China Shop.

Check out the other Blogs of the Round Table entries:

Books as Games: Omnibus post

2009-02-01T11:20:00.004-06:00

It's a little past time for this month's Round Table entry, but I really enjoyed the prompt and the way it spurred interesting thoughts and conversations. A common topic was whether a game version of a story would be a mere reproduction of the storyline. Certainly that involved questions of interactivity, but a more interesting question was whether the book's intentions and non-explicit meanings should be prioritized over the story structure that the book uses as a skeleton.

Some books, for example, have rather explicit goals, and it seems that such books, had they been originally created in an interactive medium, would have used the elements of the medium in order to achieve the intended ends. Children's books seem a good example of these types of text.

Everybody Poops:

The goal of Everybody Poops is to remove any stigma against defecation and replace it with an understanding that poop is natural, normal, and not to be taken terribly seriously. (Thus the Family Guy inversion of ""You're a naughty child and that's concentrated evil coming out the back of you.") Generally, I think that Everybody Poops is used as part of toilet training, with an implied goal of making pooping feel like a fun activity. I propose that a game version would help a child explore a world that did not hide feces as taboo, but instead presented in a lighthearted and matter-of-fact (and a dash of fancy) fashion. The interface would also have to be quite simple, given the audience.
Perhaps the player could be presented with a cartoon scene of an animal, possibly a pair: an adult and child. Clicking would activate an animation in which the adult would walk to an appropriate location and drop the deuce (e.g., hippo wades into the water, bear into the trees, domestic cat to the litter box), but would include species-specific rituals (some animals cover their leavings, most humans wipe and flush). The animation would involve humor in a similar fashion to the way that the book version does (humped camels leaving humped droppings).
After the adult returns, the player is instructed to guide the youngling by clicking on the appropriate "toilet." If there are additional steps, the player could be asked to help remind the baby. The scene would then transition to another animal pair, and eventually to a human pair as a final level. The game could have multiple human levels to show with various cultural iterations of toilets and wiping.

Perhaps a more adult-oriented version of this idea would be a game based on Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "The world is a beautiful place ... ."

The World is a Beautiful Place to be Spawned Into:
It would likely play a lot like the dream scene in Fable II.The player would be able to wander around doing the fun things listed in the poems (perhaps with others), but then suddenly die, with no "insert coin to continue," no extra lives, etc. The "death" would include a visit from the smiling mortician, whose own happiness would have to parallel the happy feedback of the main character's prior enjoyment.

But what about books that don't have as explicit an intention? What about books that are more evasive?

Hamlet:
Hamlet isn't a story that everyone agrees on. Some think that the protagonist was merely feigning insanity, while others see it as less a ruse. Still others believe the truth lies somewhere between. There are other questions as to Prince Hamlet's caution and hesitance in avenging his father, and his seemingly ambivalent feelings about others. How could a game maintain these ambiguities?

It may be that Violet is a good template for a Hamlet game. The voices within the head, the seeming inability to perform a purportedly simple task, and the complex yet cloudy portrayal of the protagonist all mirror the famous Dane's story.

Tao te Ching:
The tao that can be taught through procedural rhetoric is not the eternal Tao. In fact, the emphasis on flexibility and flow in the Tao might make for a surprisingly un-interactive game. I have trouble seeing a Tao game that is more active than Flower or the quick-time-heavy Bourne Conspiracy.A game version of the Tao would be a game that teaches players to always choose all sides, to seek balance, and at the same time to eschew action in favor of passivity and acceptance of change.

A word on intentional ambiguity:

Jonathan Blow's Braid may be an intentionally unclear game in a number of ways, and seems to specifically deal with a human tendency to obsess about finding truth and understanding (in a way that is very much unlike what the Tao would likely endorse). Blow may have gone to some lengths to dissuade players from going to such extremes, but I don't think that's necessary in all ambiguous games. It's a coder's natural tendency to define variables, but it is an artist's particular skill to leave variables undefined.

December Round Table: Life is but a Game

2008-12-28T18:17:00.012-06:00

This post is my submission to Corvus Elrond's Blogs of the Round Table subject for December of 2008. Corvus posts subjects on his blog each month, and invites bloggers to respond and discuss. This month's topic is "The Ghost of Gaming Future." Corvus asks us to look at the next 5, 10, or 20 years and predict how gaming will color ourselves, our families, and our society in the era of jetpacks and flying cars.

"We'll ask it for help."

"You can do that?"

"Yeah, on some systems. See:

The more complicated they are, the more they have to help you out."

My younger brother learned to read so that he could play RPGs and adventure games in the 1980s without a sibling or parent to translate. I think that I first realized video games' educational power when I discovered him playing Final Fantasy alone in the basement, but it wasn't until much later that I understood the more surreptitious educational aspects of video games.

You don't need to be an Ian Bogost fanboy to understand that games teach a number of things to players, or at least strongly persuade players in a number of ways. Games teach through they interpretation of reality that colors simulations in a number of situations and aspects of real human existence. Games teach players by offering specific mechanisms to use in interacting with circumstances and situations. Games train players by encouraging and discouraging various actions in problem-solving situations.

As video games have become more sophisticated, we've come to see more games making use of a slow, scattered, and often progressive tutorial approach, wherein the player is introduced to a new mechanic, tested in that mechanic, and then taught another mechanic (often with later mechanics and tests combining previous lessons). In this way, the player often doesn't stop learning until near the end of the game's story arc. Players learn to crawl, walk, run, and jump. Then they're presented an obstacle course.

Maybe it's because I recently started skimming through the tongue-in-cheek Ultimate Guide to Your Life, but the notion of comparing game mechanics to real life actions is not a new one: One need look no further than the lyrics to Kenny Roger's "The Gambler" to see that. The teaching that games do, as purposefully designed and implemented by the games' creators, is fundamentally similar to the task of a parent in introducing a child to the world's many challenges and with the many mechanics we, as humans, utilize in negotiating those challenges. Children, like new players, must learn to crawl, to walk, and to run.

As a potential father, uncle, boss, mentor, or teacher, I wonder how I would seek to present a world or field to another -- what mechanics I would explicitly teach and endorse, which I would caution against, and which potential actions I would leave in that morally dubious realm of cheating and other "game exploits."

Before presenting a young ward with a sort of toolbox, however, there lies the question of the camera. How will I choose to present the "game space" to the neophyte? Will I dictate a fixed point of view? Will I establish a default, but encourage camera manipulation? Will I encourage toggling between viewpoints? Might I go so far as to refuse to offer a perspective at all, forcing the noob to forge her own perspective?

I'm not quite sure about all of this, yet. I do, however, know that I will go out of my way to encourage the acquisition of more perspectives and abilities. I will actively endorse exploration, training, and stopping to take in every phoneme of flavor text, dialogue, and book -- every tangential mini-game and cut-scene. One thing I know I will discourage is specialization and the sort of click-though min-maxing and "optimization" that I have come to believe cheapen games, stunt thoughts, and close minds to the endless possibilities offered by our collective game-space.

Of course some of the most interesting aspects of games often fall just outside the express intentions of the game's creators. Will Wright will tell you those are his favorite parts of the games he helps build. I am eager to witness such deviancies in my own protegee.

Child's Play 2008

2008-12-01T06:13:00.003-06:00

Once upon a time, the folks at Penny-Arcade got tired of gamers being demonized in the media. They decided to organize games and gamers as a force for good. They founded Child's Play, a charity dedicated to providing toys, books, and games to sick children in hospitals.

Free giving isn't a concept many game mechanics endorse, or even acknowledge (discarding items seems far more popular than donating them at the local shelter for impoverished adventurers). At the same time, Child's Play has collected some $3,500,000 since 2003. I don't know who or what taught these gamers the joys of giving, but I'm glad for it. The charity helps children, lets gamers share their joy with others, and improves the public image of games and gamers. Quite an impressive combo.

Incidentally, it also clothes my body and assists me in sending holiday wishes to potentially less unfortunate people.

I realize that, given the current economy, many are not in a position to give, or feel less secure in their finances. I'm not going to pass judgment here on the altruism and largess of others. If you are able, however, I urge you to give this holiday season, to Child's Play or elsewhere. Charities worldwide are reporting drastically reduced donations and much higher need. These hard times drive need to new extremes of depth and breadth. Please help if you can.

Consideration, Choice, and Consequence: Fable II

2008-11-06T07:08:00.004-06:00

From what I hear, voter turnout in the US this election season hit the highest point in a century. While I take this as a point of pride, I have not been able to avoid conversations about whether everyone should vote, or if unknowledgeable or lackadaisical citizens should abstain (by choice, of course). It's a question of how seriously we should view voting: as a privilege or as a responsibility. This is a debate between the process of choice--on consideration--and the final act of choosing. This isn't my one-off political post, though. I seem to have been able to vent most of that via Google Reader and Twitter.

There's a similar consideration-choice rift to be found in discussions about Fable II, but I'm not sure most people have noticed it. That's my theory on why Noble Carrots can see Fable's unilateral plot and breadcrumb trail device as antithetical to Molyneaux's hype about Fable II being a game about choice. That's why Experience Points talks about how these "choices" are struck from the same cloth as the often simplistic moral judgments in fables and fairy tales. In the conversations of the comment threads, we struggle because we reluctantly half-agree that this game is not the game we thought it was supposed to be.

In a loose sense, this game is still about choice. It's just not about choice in the way that the original Fallout games were or that The Darkness wasn't. This isn't a game about free will (you have to earn that will XP like any other. ;) ) How indeed could this be a game about free choice when the default is to show a line illustrating the character's destiny?

Fable II isn't about "choice," but rather about the process of decision-making--about consideration. The game allows non-standard options, enforces a heightened sense of consequence (both through points and through long-term changes in the landscape), and provides strong social reactions (from dog and NPCs) that make the player think more carefully about her choices. The single-track save system reinforces this even further, making exploration of multiple options a task involving starting over as opposed to saving in an alternate location and returning later. The game's attribute-specific experience orbs again reinforce care, as choosing different strategies will directly effect the development of the character within the strength-skill-will paradigm.

What this means is that the game actively pressures against inattentive gameplay. Corvus found that he was too attached to the game's characters to want to play an evil character:

What I found, within the first half hour of play is that I didn’t want to be a villain in this Albion. I was too charmed by its inhabitants, and their endless love of fart jokes, to systematically treat them cruelly.

This game makes lackadaisical players regret not putting more thought in before choosing. Fable II attacks players' training. We've been trained to accept every available quest, to relentlessly pursue experience points at every opportunity, and to perform wildly out-of-character acts with the presumption that the story will remain largely unchanged. The main story may not change much, but the main story isn't what makes Fable II meaningful. What makes Fable II meaningful is, in large part, the depth of interaction between the player to her world.

Fable II's choices are indeed caught within the same manichaean view that makes any good Han Solo fan wince. The overt judgment imposed on your actions by the addition of positive and negative points isn't where the game's real consequences shine, however. As gamers, we're used to the sort of story and setting that is tacked-on after the game's combat and leveling mechanics are laid out. It's the first time that the player realizes that jacking up rent condemns the occupant to hand-to-mouth living, or that seemingly minor choices made as a child play vital roles in what the world looks like when the child is grown.

Did this game, as advertised, conquer the "Han Solo problem"? Perhaps, and more. Not only does Fable II allow for imperfect heroes, but it reveals a deeper issue with "Han Solo" characters: It's not just that they have a more complicated moral view than your average light switch. What truly makes "gray area" characters compelling is that, like us, they struggle with morality, with anticipating all the reactions and implications of their actions, and with how their choices will shape their future selves. It is in this way that Mr. Molyneux succeeds not only in the "Han Solo problem," but also in his stated intent to make a game that we will truly remember.

EM

2008-11-04T15:55:00.003-06:00

Funtime post!

Potential meanings of "EM":

E Munnie -- my Xbox Live handle
Elements of Meaning -- Some blog by a nerd
"Em," a typographical measurement of the maximum width of a character, equal to the number of points in a font.
Emerging Markets, I guess.
Extended Metaphor -- The best kind of metaphor.
Emulsion?
Emergency Medicine
Electromagnetism
Emphasis
End of Medium
Contracted slang form of "them"
AND MORE!

E.O.M.

The Unfinished Swan

2008-10-31T12:02:00.006-05:00

via Game Girl Advance

This video has been going the rounds on the blogs and games sites in the past week. I've only seen the video, but I think it's a fascinating idea.

While not the first game to replace the standard destructive gun with a new tool, the mechanic of this Unfinished Swan's paintball gun is new. Portal's subversive mechanic was to replace a tool that is used to interact via destruction with a tool that builds connections. Unfinished Swan puts the player in a position where the gun is the method by which the player creates meaning and translates the game space into something intelligible. The use of the paint creates distinction among the ether. Though the objects painted already existed, they did not exist in a discernible way. The application of paint makes the objects more real.

Perhaps less directly, the application of paint--the main method of interaction in the video, other than movement with a space--is a means by which the player comes to understand her surroundings, rather than a means to destroy.

I'll admit that this is, in a sense, a more permanent version of the flashlight tool, which has existed for some time. (The same could possibly be said for Portal--portals themselves just being a different form of the doorways that have been around since Wolfenstein and beyond.) Flashlights in games, however, have often been restricted via things like battery life, which tends to discourage their use, or at least encourage conserving their use. The paint is put forward as the primary means of interaction here, though. I wouldn't be surprised if there was "limited ammunition" in this case, but I think that the promotion to primary interaction ("left click," as it were) and the permanence of the paint are crucial factors. If anything, it would seem that limited paint encourages a notion that, in our journeys as players and otherwise, definition is important, though perhaps we should learn to get by without having to define every last inch.

I'm glad to see this new step in expanding the tool box for players, especially within the first-person environment. Where traditionally, we had the main means of interaction being violent destruction (via ranged, melee, and indirect weapons), we've since added interaction by taking (gravity guns), interaction by bridging (portals), and interaction by defining (Swan's paint). At the heart of all these primary mechanics is something central to how these games teach players to deal with problems.

In the early days, problems came in the form of direct physical threats, which needed to be destroyed with violence. We gained new ways of dealing with our problems: Gravity guns and "physics puzzles" taught us to take, give, and move as a means of solving our problems. Portals taught us to solve problems by building connections to other places and things, endorsing networking and analogy as problem-solving strategies. Now we see defining the problem as a new strategy. Unfinished Swan, at least in this clip, teaches us as players that many problems can be solved simply by getting a better understanding of the problem and our environment. In a way, that makes it similar to Echochrome, which teaches that problems can be solved simply by gaining and switching to new perspectives on our problems.

EDIT: It's been suggested that I also mention de Blob. While the painting mechanic is similar, it seems from the videos I've seen that de Blob's painting mechanic is used less as a problem-solving method, and more as an overall character aspect, plot element, and overt political commentary. I could be wrong about that.

DESIGNER NOTES - Seven Deadly Sins for Strategy Games

2008-10-20T12:33:00.005-05:00

Edit: I should have put more thought into this. It's simply not very focused on the initial idea of the meaning behind what I'd think of as "strategy game genre conventions." I guess I've just obligated myself to posting about both the genre convention meanings as well as the meaning of the departures that these "sins" represent.

DESIGNER NOTES - Game Developer Column 1: Seven Deadly Sins for Strategy Games: Amongst computer games, the strategy genre is one of the oldest and proudest, with a strong tradition, running from M.U.L.E. to Civilization to Starcraft and beyond. Nonetheless, certain design mistakes keep being made over and over again. Here are seven of the most common

Since I just wrote about bad game mechanics, I figured it might be worthwhile to take on some of these "No Twinkie" design choices, and see what sort of mentality they teach or fail to reinforce. I'm going to take as a central part of strategy games the notion that strategy games are simulations of some real or fictional world. The objective is to model that world in a way that incorporates a certain level of cause and effect.

For example, war games (be they with cardboard shits, pewter figurines, or pixels) often treat historical wars in which there was a very real rock-paper-scissors aspect in the interworking of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Historical war games incorporate that dynamic, which teaches strategy to green players and lets veteran players sharpen their strategic sophistication through replaying scenarios with different strategies.

Quick disclaimer: I was raised on old-fashioned war games in the basement. I made some spare change painting Napoleonic miniatures as a young lad. While I have experience with real-time strategy games on computers, I admit a preference for turns, hexes, and multiplayer, bearded play.

1. Too much scripting

I feel that scripting in strategy games is the result of a decision to add a more compelling gameplay narrative to the single-player game. The problem I see with "scripting" occurs when the script seems arbitrary to the player (e.g., player actions as triggers that aren't logically connected to the reaction).

I fully understand troops that show up at a prescribed time for off-map reasons (reinforcement schedules at Gettysburg and the Prussian arrival at Waterloo are good examples). I can even see a faction responding negatively to encroachments within its territory, or occupation of "buffer" zones outside that territory. If the trigger is "the player has built a tank factory," however, I would hope there's some indication that the AI faction has in-game means of monitoring that situation. That is, the trigger should be "the AI faction gains knowledge that the player faction has built a tank factory." The reason for the AI response should be signalled to the player, and, if there's otherwise a lull in the action, this could be a good time for a cut scene and shift to the next scenario: "Attack of the Tank-Hating AI."

This design sin falls under the more general design rule of "Never let the game seem arbitrary."

2. Too Much Stuff

In any simulation, there is a question of detail. Games can err with too simple a model, but often err with too complicated a model. In non-historical settings, this temptation is even greater, as the constraints of reality tend to limit redundancy in units, building types, etc. Game designers need to look at every unit proposal with the exacting eye of a treasurer and the perspicacity of a field general in order to understand the usefulness of the item and where it fits in the overall strategic mechanics of how units cooperate with and battle all other types of units.

3. Limited Play Variety

This is a problem of simple games and story-heavy strategy games, at least within the single-player realm. It's a question of finding a middle ground that appeals to the player. Like Soren Johnson points out, never let the game's plot or setting define what kind of scenarios can be played outside the "story mode." A WWII game could easily have an added scenario of Russians vs. Japanese or British vs. Americans. Why not leave it a possibility?

4. Black Box Mechanics

A great way to avoid the appearance of arbitrariness is to let players see the numbers. Overkill is possible, however.

5. Locked Code/Data

Releasing code allows for modification (in turn creating more depth and replay potential), more play variety, and a feeling that the game is intelligible and non-arbitrary.

6. Anti-Piracy Paranoia

This is, in my mind, more a question about controlling access to the game. While there might be overall sheens of egalitarianism and elitism in the back of the players mind, or a general notion that the game doesn't like the player, I do not consider DRM as a meaningful element of the game art.

7. Putting Story in the Wrong Places

Again, story in strategy games is a method of providing context and of creating signposts and scripted intrigue (which could otherwise be dynamically added by other players in multiplayer contexts). When story shows up in other places, the designer is making a deliberate move to cross genre lines. While there isn't an explicit problem with blending genders, it should be done with intent and good reason.

The Independent: Thomas Sutcliffe: Why don't we take computer games more seriously?

2008-10-20T11:28:00.002-05:00

Via Rock Paper Shotgun http://www.rockpapershotgun.com

The Independent: Thomas Sutcliffe: Why don't we take computer games more seriously?:

From time to time a new game release, such as Will Wright's recently released Spor, will edge its way on to the news pages – and most newspapers carry some form of capsule reviews . But usually they're tucked away in the back alleys of the publication, while film and music and television continue to dominate the big boulevards. Mainstream television does virtually nothing. Arts programmes remain almost exclusively dedicated to cultural forms which are also-rans for many teenagers.

Quickly: It's easy to say that games aren't taken seriously because games don't take themselves seriously, because gamers don't take games seriously, or because designers don't take themselves seriously. At least the first two are often true. Frankly, though, Generation X was the first generation to have video games around while growing up. Because the games were built and marketed toward kids then, there's still a cultural resistance to games in the elder generations, which seeps back in to the children, students, readers, audiences, and subordinates of younger generations.

When the generation that grew up with games reaches the age where they are the majority of CEOs, principals, pastors, congress persons, and editors in chief, we will see our cultural inertial against games quickly dissolve.

Braid World 5: Time and Decision

2008-10-19T17:58:00.004-05:00

Hey, guess what? We make choices. I chose to slack off and not finish posting about Braid. Perhaps a parallel version of myself (let's call him "Turdsmythe"), in some parallel reality, was spending that time writing about Braid's worlds five, six, and one. Maybe he's already nice and finished and organized. There's probably some "Wyrdsmif" version out there who would fail to submit homework on time and would, unlike me, try and give lame excuses for that. Wyrdsmif sounds like a tool, though.

What does it mean that Turdsmythe was doing this while I was playing Force Unleashed, watching John Cusack movies, and struggling to ignore financial news? Maybe it means Ol'd Turdy is a better man, or at least a better blogger. If nothing else, possible parallel versions of ourselves now are possible future versions of what we were. Possible future versions of ourselves define our choices and our potential. Who Turdy is adds meaning to the options I had and the decisions I made.

Braid does a neat thing in World 5. Here, the player controls both Wordsmythe and Turdsmythe. Specifically, the player guides Tim through one possibility and then rewinds in order to guide Tim through a different path. What makes Braid's treatment of this idea different from the standard human experience is that the two possible Tims can still interact, via objects that both Tim and his "shadow" can interact with. (The "she" in the opening text for World 5 is one such element.) These objects provide a bridge between who Tim is and who Tim could be, given different choices in the past.

This working with who Tim was, could be, and could have been fits nicely within the idea of Tim exploring his own mind. We are, in large part, defined by our decisions. Those decisions are in turn defined by the options presented, and those options are largely understood in terms of their potential outcomes. All of this plays a role in how we view ourselves, and is worth coming to terms with on in our personal mental wanderings.

Less directed mental wanderings:

The notion of being able to work with parallel versions of one's self isn't new. Most of us can probably recall a handful of movies and television shows in which a character interacts with other versions of him/herself--usually this quickly moves into notions of one doing homework or chores so that the other can slack off, or possibly do something useful and necessary. Hijinks ensue, and you can bet they're wacky. Unfortunately for Shadow Tim, he doing menial tasks is the high point of his alternate life. He also gets to sacrifice his life a few times for his alternate self.

The Bible (John 15:13) holds that sacrificing one's life for a friend is the utmost act of love. I suppose that when the friend in question is an alternate version of the lover, it becomes self-love, which may be a little less positively viewed. Either way, I do wonder if it counts as sacrifice when it's for what still amounts to personal gain. I know that I certainly didn't feel like I was making much of a sacrifice while playing as Tim, in large part because I'd already learned to kill myself, and that death lacks much sting when deprived of its permanence.

What does it say about us that we want to view different versions of ourselves as tools to meet our ends, be they petty ends like homework or more lofty ends of Princess-restoration and self-actualization? I'd say it makes us jerks, but then I also feel like I treat Wordsmythe, my non-Schrodinger-style possible self, in a less than delicate and sympathetic manner sometimes.

But then at other times I bake and eat chocolate chip cookies instead of working or improving myself in a less weight-related manner.

Power Vs. Force | Gamers With Jobs

2008-10-16T17:05:00.002-05:00

Power Vs. Force | Gamers With Jobs: "On the other hand, we have forceful game design that attempts to shove fun down my throat. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a great example of this. The fundamentals are immediately on shaky ground, because the basic light saber controls are clunky and lack flow. The camera, which is a mix of environment and control, often misses important context and leaves me vulnerable to attacks from unseen enemies. These same problems also mean that aiming force attacks can be a pain unless you’re willing to run away and setup for a good blast. It’s hard to be spontaneous when you never feel like you’re really in control to begin with."

Shawn causes me to consider how "deep reading" deals with authorial decisions that (one hopes, at least) were made unintentionally, or at least without much care. The mechanics of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed make wielding the Force a clumsy endeavor and lightsaber fighting clumsy, slow, inaccurate, and often largely ineffectual. Not only does that not seem to jive with my understanding of the Star Wars universe, but it seems to be in direct conflict with the title of the game.

In modern literary analysis, authorial intent is either presumed or rendered impotent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy). I could explore the deeper meanings of an unwieldy Force and a light saber that functions more like a heavy club than a nearly weightless weapon capable of slicing and instantly cauterizing almost any material--a weapon so intrinsically dangerous, a blade so eager to slash and destroy that it was considered almost necessary to have Force powers in order to effectively wield it and not be a danger to one's self. I could write about the meaning behind invisible walls and the unintelligible difference between surfaces that can be stood or walked on and other, identical, surfaces that are seemingly frictionless.

I digress. Such an interpretation could be a fun little exercise, and would almost certainly bring us to humorous interpretations of the nature of the Star Wars universe, or perhaps of the nature of heroism, but all that would just serve to illustrate how wrong the sloppy mechanics of the game are.

I'm not innocent of turning in sloppy work. I understand, though, that the intellectual quality of half-ignored paperwork isn't going to be what it ought to be. In the case of professional or academic writing, I feel guilt in that someone is going to read it and put effort into understanding it--with the expectation of thoughtful analysis and the revelation of new information or points of view.

The mechanics of Force Unleashed are sloppy. They were a tax on my time while playing, and a solid analysis of any meaning accidentally conveyed by the gameplay mechanics would similarly be a waste of time.

That all said, I think the plot and story of the game were wonderful, and go a long way to cleanse the franchise of the stains of the newer trilogy.

MTV Multiplayer � The Fate Of The Missing Underwater ‘Spore’ Stage

2008-10-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

MTV Multiplayer � The Fate Of The Missing Underwater ‘Spore’ Stage

If I'm fair to Mr. Wright, it looks like the underwater level's play isn't terribly different from the first level.

MTV Multiplayer Game Diary - October 15, 2008: ‘Dead Space’ Dealbreaker?

2008-10-15T09:03:00.002-05:00

MTV Multiplayer Game Diary - October 15, 2008: ‘Dead Space’ Dealbreaker?

I have a problem with games that force long single-scene succeed-or-fail scenarios. I understand that save points are on either end, since it's "just" one scene, but this type of mechanic amounts to a 15-minute "quicktime event," which most designers already well know to avoid.

Forgive me, as I just finished Star Wars: Force Unleashed this morning. There were plenty of problems with game mechanics, but my least favorite was probably the extended set-piece battles, featuring waves of opponents, but often lacking save points between waves. Mr. Toltilo's mention of the phone call reminds me that this design flaw used to be a frequent cause of trouble with parents, significant others, and punctuality--at least until I learned not to tolerate the instant reload's call of "You almost made it, but for that lucky shot and unfortunate juggling of your lifeless ragdoll body. Surely you'll beat the level this time!"

Quick note

2008-10-03T16:40:00.000-05:00

Braid Worlds 3 & 4: "Time & Remembrance" and "Time and Place"

2008-09-30T22:24:00.007-05:00

Been too long. Spore is a hell of a drug (not to mention fascinating in how the rules of each stage relate to similar games, and in how every action has a consequence--except some purely cosmetic choices).

For the record, I believe that it's best to put non-quoted punctuation outside of quotation marks in the interests of accuracy. I realize this might make me look like some terrible, anti-American devil, but I've been called worse in the name of syntactical accuracy.

World 3 begins with text about Tim having chosen to leave the Princess, and how now he's trying to find her again and explain his mixed emotions about leaving. Both had done all they could to avoid making mistakes with each other, which must have been a fairly hollow relationship, despite never being explicitly disappointing. Tim left in pursuit of "a castle where flags flutter even when the wind has expired, and the bread in the kitchen is always warm. A little bit of magic."

Turns out that that last bit about "always" means that some things will be immune to Tim's time-control power. These are what I came to call "the glowy-green things."

Generally, World 3 is about learning to stagger and coordinate the controlled along with the uncontrollable, which seems a fairly good life lesson.

These glowing green blocks can move on their own accord. In world 3.5, an uncontrollable and a regular block are moving to intersect each other. The controllable block will get there first and cut off the uncontrollable block unless the player needs to rewind time. This means in world 3.5 ("Tight Channels") that the player in fact has to be fairly flawless for the first section, else she'll have to rewind and ruin the timing of the intersection. Luckily, this is where I learned that while (closed) doors are the only thing Tim can't rewind through, walking back through the entry door and returning will reset the level. Certainly this mechanic is partially available as a way of making the game more forgiving. Then again, the game is otherwise all about doubling back and "opening closed doors" in an attempt to make things right.

The key puzzles in 3.5 emphasize using green and non-green keys in a specific order. Some doors are green and cannot be closed once open. That could be a sinister lesson that mimics a Pandora's Box scenario, but in this case the player is glad to have as many doors open as possible. (Everyone likes more possibilities, in lieu of constraints, after all.)

3.5 also has a puzzle involving keeping Goombas alive until Tim need to kill them. I still feel bad for killing Goombas, but that's due to non-mechanical cues. Anyway, at least it teaches the player to hesitate before killing indiscriminately.

3.6, "Lair", has a "to die is gain" message at the outset. I doubt Mr. Blow was trying to teach gamers an explicitly Christian message here, but the notion of sacrifice for later gain is not the sole intellectual property of Jesus anyway. Tim has to jump into a pit of spikes to retrieve a green key, which will then stay with him as the player rewinds. The "boss" looks like a combination of a Goomba and the mystery knight in the climatic scene of World 1, but I promised myself not to get hung up on interpreting the imagery. (Maybe I'll get back to it in a later post.)

World 4, "Time and Place", explores time as a dimension tied to the X-axis of the screen. When Tim moves to the right, time progresses. When Tim moves to the left, time reverses. While it's a neat idea, and perhaps even true, given our limited knowledge of what the common four dimensions look like from the perspective of a fifth or higher dimension, I'm not sure that the mechanic serves as much of a metaphor.

The text at World 4's beginning shows vignettes of Tim revisiting his childhood home and alma mater. Tim has almost entirely negative feelings in his memories of childhood and schooling. He sees himself as having progressed. (Side note: Funny that time and progress are so often depicted as towards the right in our culture, when forward or upward seem both to make more sense as well as be more universalizable.) The text generally explores the idea of emotions being attached to time and place, and whether they form signposts in memory in a way that is reminiscent of web 2.0 tags for articles. Tim's no longer certain the Princess exists, but is certain she embodies a transformative power for Tim and everyone else. She'll certainly change the idea of one emotion per memory.

4.3, "Just Out of Reach", involves jumping on falling Goombas at just the right angle (from the right) to not kill them, since killing backwards apparently results in a comic sound and the ability to jump higher. A Goomba also has to be spared until he grabs a key from where Tim can't otherwise reach, reinforcing the dilemma of not indiscriminately killing, but at least waiting until they've outlived their usefulness.

4.6, "Movement, Amplified", makes approaching doors part of the puzzle. Coming at a door from the wrong angle (i.e., from the right, so time is moving backwards) proves useless. Opening doors backwards isn't as funny as killing backwards. In fact, it just costs Tim the key Tim was going to use. I suppose this could be a reinforcement of the idea of approaching problems "head on" as opposed to ass-backwards. Either way, it's about the angle

"Fickle Companion", World 4.7, was a frustrating level for me personally. Maybe I was just having an impatient day. Either way, 4.7 features a puzzle in which the player needs to move a non-green key to the left. The key, however, goes backwards in time as Tim moves to the left. The puzzle becomes a lesson in meticulously choreographing and performing Tim's past up until the point where he gets the key. Tim's lucky in that the player can redirect his past and try again at the push of a button. As it is, the puzzle demonstrates that one's past can be a major factor in one's future success. Unlike the key, one's history is not a "fickle companion," but an inherent aspect of one's present self.

More to come in a day or two, hopefully. I plan on wrapping up this analysis of Braid's mechanics before next Wednesday. After that, I'll try my hand at looking for how the time mechanics in Braid and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time convey different meanings.

Master of Orion II

2008-09-24T07:16:00.003-05:00

Quintin Stone, a friend/nemesis of mine, recently posted this mini-review of his experience playing Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares. Since he doesn't have a comment section (or at least not one that I could find), I figured I'd post a little response here.

Quintin makes the following points about the gameplay:

"a non-creative race absolutely must tech trade ... in this game, tech is life."
"micromanagement becomes nearly unbearable."
AI players never refit their old ships with new tech. When you have limited command points and every ship matters, this is a big deal. The big scary alien fleets turn out to have quite the glass jaw when you realize most of those battleships have Class I shields that crumple like paper in the face of your death rays and particle beams.

I suppose I didn't notice these problems myself because I tend toward science and diplomacy in the Orion and Civilization games. I did notice that the game feels like it begins by encouraging micromanagement, but starts to make "small ball" an undesirable strategy as the player's empire expands. At the same time, the player’s empire's ability to build ships to battle other empires is limited by the size and number of the player’s colonies. All this seems to me to make the player very cautious about what she wants to do, and always ask herself, "Is this worth it in the long run?"

The failure of the AI to incorporate new technologies in old ships (by refitting the old fleet) seems to me to make new technology even more useful to the player than Quintin points out. Tech is king in Orion games, and I think there's an overt lesson there: Never fall behind in the tech race, id est, always stay reasonably well educated. (No wonder my dad encouraged me to play the Orion games.)

Occasionally the player will find a weak spot in another's defenses and exploit it, gaining more, stronger colonies without having to have colonized and nurtured the star systems the player occupies. The player might be able to leverage that extra size into a military victory. Then again, she’d better not fall behind in tech.

Ultimately, Orion II is about size, strength, knowledge, and diplomacy. In order to succeed, the player has to be decent at each, and lead the galaxy in at least one. It encourages the player to be well-rounded in all things, while also seeking to exploit her personal strengths.

Wired on Spore

2008-09-22T15:29:00.003-05:00

Just ran across a Wired blog post from Chris Kohler on the lessons of Spore. Kohler does some of the sort of analysis I'm trying to get more into here, but sort of tapers off into what seems more like humor, or perhaps he just felt like his writing wasn't enough of a "review" per se.

Either way, I'll be thinking about it as I write about Spore later on, and I want to get into the habit of linking to the sort of things I'm taking into consideration when I write my own stuff.

"Mistakes were made."

2008-09-22T06:25:00.004-05:00

I was going to post World 3 thoughts, but then I used my beta access at GOG.com to snag Citizen Kabuto and Fallout 2. Somehow Fallout 2 proved more enticing than just about anything else going on in my life, including the unopend Spore box on my desk.

By the way, I'm going to have fun interpreting the mechanics of Spore. I don't intend to give that treatment to F2.

Meaning of Braid's Mechanincs: World 2

2008-09-20T15:18:00.007-05:00

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ SPOILERS, YOU’RE ON THE WRONG BLOG.

[For those unfamiliar with the term “procedural rhetoric”, you can read about it and find a sweet example of analysis of procedural rhetoric. The short version, from my point of view, is that games communicate via a number of types of communicative elements: visual, audio, literary, and procedural. In investigate “procedural rhetoric” is to ask “What do the mechanics of the game-play communicate?”]

Braid isn’t simply a game about regret, hindsight, hubris, nuclear bombs, or TNT. It’s also a game about control and perspective. Braid is a game that begins with the premise that Tim (note the name’s similarity to “Time”) made a costly mistake. His memories aren’t quite clear on the matter, though.

Also, he can reverse time. Sort of feels like that ought to solve the problem of regret, doesn’t it?

Luckily, the game (and the rewinding) doesn’t take place in reality. Instead, Tim begins by running indoors from a burning night sky, prominently marked by the Cassiopeia constellation (so much meaning there!). Tim runs into a house (presumably his own), which we can pretty easily conclude is a metaphor for Tim’s mind. It has rooms with doors. The doors lead to “worlds” of clouds (so we’re pretty clearly inside Tim’s thoughts), where there are two main elements: books and more doors. The doors lead to strange dream levels where Tim proceeds to collect pieces of puzzles. After collecting the pieces, he puts them together to form an image. The game then notifies the player that the room of the house is complete. A puzzle workspace is featured predominantly in the room of the house to which it corresponds, as well as within one of the levels in the room’s world.

Piecing together images in the mind. So far, it’s pretty well-worn ground for anyone who’s dabbled in psychology or most artistic interpretation.

Great, that’s out of the way. How you get those puzzle pieces is where Braid starts making actual statements. Let’s look at the way each “world” works. Hopefully I’ll stay mostly on that topic.

World 2: Time and Forgiveness

This world sets up with text about regret and the desire to take back the things one’s done or said. Via this hypothetical, Tim is able to navigate his wounded mind and reconstruct his shattered memories.

Level 2.1, “Three Easy Pieces” teaches the player the basics of the platformer-style controls: jumping, climbing, bouncing off enemies to jump higher, and avoiding danger in the form of enemies and spiky fire pits of death. If Tim “dies”, the game prompts the player to press X, which rewinds the action until the player takes her thumb off the button. The player can rewind all the way to the beginning of the level, without limitation. The player can rewind at any time. Enemies are archetypal “Goombas” that pop out of cannons. The cannons indicate time until a new one spawns via a burning fuse.

I’m going to take the basic platform elements (e.g., killing others as a way to reach new heights) as a given in the genre. Maybe I’ll critique the genre in general some other time. I might also talk about all the rich information being brought in through visual cues (the death throes of the goombas, the wooden crates). Let’s call 2.1 the introduction to how the gameplay. The player learns how to operate within the context of this hypothetical realm of infinite Ctrl+Z. Basically, Tim is traversing parts of his mind, avoiding danger, using, avoiding, and slaying various psychic monsters. (Feel free to spend half an hour thinking about how that relates to analytical psych as well as to Nietzsche.)

Level 2.2, “Cloud Bridge” introduces using clouds for transportation, as well as the elements of doors, keys, and cannons that shoot clouds instead of goombas. This level also forces the player to go on without collecting all the pieces, since the player needs to collect and assemble other pieces, which contain a platform that Tim and the nearby goomba can stand on in order to reach otherwise unattainable pieces.

There’s deeper meaning here. Not only does this show that Tim’s memories have substance (a theme that’s brought back up in the epilogue), but the game also actively dissuades players from the traditional expectation of linear play. The process of reconstructing memories is not to be seen as straightforward. The process involves doubling back, and building off other pieces, and it means creating and manipulating footholds where there previously was a void.

I realize that Braid’s designer Jonathan Blow has said that he intentionally chose to allow players to skip some spots and return later because he realized players will have easier times with some problems than with others. I’m going to assert, however, that Mr. Blow may have had other reasons, and that, regardless of the reason, the mechanic still has meaning. In fact, Blow’s recognition that “different people find different puzzles harder than others” can apply fairly easily to the psychological journeys of Tim and everyone else.

Level 2.3, “Hunt!”, Tim needs to kill enemies in order to unlock a door to another piece. Care needs to be taken in fighting these mental gorgons, however, since Tim needs to leave spare one for a short time in order to bounce off it later. Again we see a reinforcement of a less than straightforward linearity to solving Tim’s problems.

Level 2.4, “Leap of Faith”, introduces levers for moving platforms around. The platforms need to be moved in order to facilitate movement both of Tim and of the goombas Tim needs to bounce off of. Tim can now manipulate time, pieces of memory, and some parts of the terrain in his mental landscape. This newfound ability is picky, in that Tim has to be in specific locations and the moved terrain has very limited mobility, but it’s enough to help him put his mind back together.

The “leap of faith” in the level is all about timing and tricky navigation. While that’s a given in platformers, the direct reference to this event in the level’s title reminds us that these are important factors. Navigating our psyches can be delicate work of timing and accuracy, and will probably take a few attempts before success.

So far, we have learned these things about exploring the psyche:

Time is malleable.
Our enemies and fears can also be beneficial, or even vital for progress.
Our enemies may be easily conquered, but they can also be easily replaced.
It’s tricky.
Try, try again.

Know what? That’s pretty log for one post. I’ve got more, but I think I’ll leave it for tomorrow.

I realize this isn’t as organized as some people would prefer. Let’s just say I’m modeling Braid’s nonlinear gameplay. ;)

Braid's texts

2008-09-20T12:40:00.001-05:00

I've transcribed all the book text in Braid, including the hidden texts in the Epilogue. I will probably post them, but may need harassing to actually put them up.

Friday = Post

2008-09-19T20:06:00.004-05:00

That sort of feel like it will become my schedule, at least. This one might be a disappointment.

I've spent most of my free time this week reading every blog post, interview, and review I could find (I'll shower links later) about Braid. I took notes. I read comments and took notes.

Then I booted up Braid and took notes. I took notes on level names, on color schemes, backgrounds, play, mechanics, music, and a number of other things (including what the game-play and puzzle solutions teach the player).

I really think I'd be going into overkill picking apart all of that and how it fits together into a bigger picture of the game--sort of like collecting all the puzzle pieces in order to later put them together. Like in the game, I'm sure some pieces will prove more illustrative and enlightening than others.

Anyway, late tonight or tomorrow morning I'll post a fairly long look at what I think the game communicates through the various mechanics and puzzle solutions. Not now, though.

Elements of Meaning

2008-09-12T09:19:00.011-05:00

Among other things, my main intention in starting this blog is to analyze video games. Yes, I know I'm pretentious and nerdy.

I've done a fair amount of interpretation and explication in the worlds of visual art (mostly 2D), literature, and poetry. I've been fortunate enough to at least have been exposed to analysis of other art forms such as dance, sculpture, film, and theater.

One constant in any interpretive venture I've encountered, though, has been a focus on building an interpretation and analysis on a firm foundation of the formal elements of the medium in question, and proceeding upwards and outwards from that foundation with informal elements and analysis. Drawings and paintings are built on color, tone, contrast, line, shape, balance, negative space, texture, and size, but the meaning of such works can also stem heavily from image subject, symbolism, allusion, context (in terms of socio-historical context as well as location in an art gallery or museum), and a host of other more obscure or esoteric elements. Poetry can be analyzed based on meter, cadence, line, stanza, rhyme, schemes, tropes, but also on imagery, reference, reader response, historical context, critical dialogue, authorial intent or authorial biography.

A main task of this blog is to figure out what those formal and informal elements of games are, and to apply that elemental understanding towards a deeper understanding of individual games. I hope to take care to start with concrete elements before jumping into speculation and what allusions I either caught or inferred on my own. Hopefully that means that I won't approach Braid in terms of applying a pre-formed Impressionist, Realist, Romanticist, feminist, socialist, anthropological, New Historicist, PoMo, or any other view, just as I hope to avoid building an entire understanding of Braid based on how closely it models the lyrics of Cher's If I Could Turn Back Time, (tempting though that is).

I welcome any and all comments, links, critiques, and advice aimed at furthering this exploration. I readily admit I'm no Robert Hughes or Stanley Fish (or, for that matter, Marx or Freud). I'm just a gamer who sometimes considers sleeping with his copy of Norton's Anthology of Theory and Criticism--and I don't consider that a problem.

[Begin recording]

2008-09-08T12:54:00.003-05:00

It's about time I stopped spending all day on Google Reader. This post is a place-holder. I plan on posting thoughts regarding Braid within the week.