Readings: Conflict Management

You know, in future, I should just be honest and go on hiatus during the work crush between mid-October and mid-December. Anyhow, I’ve got a bit of a links backlog to get through, so let’s get to it! This set of readings sees the player at war with the text, other characters, and the player character itself.

Choose Your Own Enemy, from Jay Barnson of Rampant Coyote, discusses the possibility of extending a morality system to shape the villain of a story in reaction to the hero’s actions. In theory, this could make the story more meaningful by presenting the villain as everything the hero opposes, or create a Batman/Joker scenario where the villain is a dark mirror of the hero. Its a clever twist on the idea of the hero’s actions affecting the story. More importantly, it’s a very gamelike approach to a classical storytelling trope. I’d love to see this implemented, even in a small way.

In Cinematic Action Gunplay, Sparky Clarkson makes the argument that the difficulty of Uncharted 3 hinders its presentation of the player character as an invincible action hero. Others have commented generally that the Uncharted franchise makes an awkward fit between its cutscenes and its gameplay, but this is one of the most cohesive arguments I’ve yet seen on why exactly that is.

Michael Abbot writes Who Needs Winners? on a subject quite dear to my heart (and quite common on my Twitter feed): the fact that differences in play styles complicate judgements that compare one design philosophy to another. This is a difficult question that game criticism needs to keep grappling with. We have to keep player variation in mind when developing critical judgements, but we don’t want to throw up our hands and yell WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT either. Abbot proposes a simple classification of game storytelling styles with different goals, which I think is a good start. Getting a sense of what different styles are and what they aim to do will help ground those critical judgements in the long run.

Just designing for a variety of player preferences isn’t necessarily the answer, either. In his piece on Skyrim and RPG anxiety, Rowan Kaiser digs into how, by trying to be open to varying play styles, the game makes any one of those play styles feel like the wrong one.

Following on the theme of player/game dynamics in criticism, Eric Swain of The Game Critique has a terrific post tearing into some criticisms of his criticism of Limbo, a game for which I share Swain’s lack of enchantment. Swain argues against defenses of the game that rely too heavily on unsupported interpretations in a reminder that, even with player variation, a game is still a stable text that puts constraints on the range of experiences.

Readings: Outside the Lines

Holy crap, I’m back! And I’ve even had time to read things! Here are some of those things.

First off, Kirk Battle brings his uniquely legal perspective to explain the difference between playing Magic on a tabletop versus a computer in a Kill Screen post called In Brief: Who Rules the Rules? He makes a convincing argument that the change of medium changes the nature of the game. It’s particularly interesting to me, given my recent curiosity about adapting the Amber tabletop system.

Meanwhile, the inimitable Mattie Brice has been strapping on her reasonable female armor and taking on the patriarchy on two fronts this week. First, there’s a piece at PopMatters about the tragic lack of male sexualization in videogames. It’s a good reminder that increasing equality in pop culture really isn’t about removing types of expression (the usual PC blah blah complaint) but about opening up types of expression that aren’t currently available. Also, boners.

And over at Kotaku, Brice baits the worst of the commentariat with Why I Don’t Feel Welcome at Kotaku. They promptly prove her point by coming up with (so far) 819 ways to say, “Jeepers! If the only community I feel accepted in starts openly including people who aren’t exactly like me, how can I be sure they’ll still accept me?!” Adult society continues to not give a shit about their cry-cry faces. If you visit the comment section, do bring a copy of @fireholly99‘s Sexism in Games Bingo. Make a drinking game of it, perhaps.

Finally, there’s a really interesting exchange going on between Brendan Keogh and John Walker about Modern Warfare 3. First Walker had a negative review of MW3 that went so far as to call it an “un-game.” Keogh responded with a defense that argued Walker was approaching the game wrong, and Walker re-argued his point in Why Modern Warfare 3 Remains an Un-Game.

What’s fascinating to me is that this whole debate seems to illustrate something Dan Cox and I have discussed regarding the designer’s “ideal player.” The core of Keogh and Walker’s disagreement is that Walker thinks MW3 is paced horribly and constantly blocks him from doing what he wants to do, and Keogh thinks it is paced magnificently and responds to his every desire.   I haven’t played Modern Warfare 3, but my suspicion is that, like the Halo games, it has been play-tested within an inch of its life to get that pacing calibrated perfectly to the behavior of the average player. Keogh has the good fortune to fall comfortably within that average; Walker does not. As a result, Keogh feels like a god while playing; Walker feels like a pawn being jerked around.

The really amazing thing is that it sounds like Walker is only slightly off the average. It’s not like he wants to throw down his gun and choose pacifism, or even choose his own strategy for each mission. The things that bother him are the timing at which an event triggers or whether or not he can open a door before another character arrives. Very, very small deviations from the ideal player the game is designed for. And yet, as Adrian Forest put it in a response to Keogh on Twitter, Walker “does not seem to have played the same game you and I seem to have played.”

That’s the peril of designing for an ideal or average player: someone’s going to get left out in the cold. At the same time, it sounds like people who fit that ideal can have a pretty rapturous experience. In any case, there’s an unusual amount of connections between the posts I’m linking today. How do you deal with deviations from the norm? What do you lose and gain when you choose to design for a specific kind of behavior?

Readings: Dynamic Systems

Posting a day late due to some travel kerfuffles yesterday. For the record, and since I haven’t announced it before, here’s the planned schedule I have in my head: Readings on Tuesday, a Mouthwash update on Thursday (if there’s been progress), Short Reviews on Friday, and a feature every week but whenever. Next week will be another disruption in bloggery, since I’ll be at a conference, but I’ll be back and fairly stable after that. Anyhow, lots of good stuff this week!

My new favorite blog is Dan Cox’s Digital Ephemera, which had a great response to my post on moral incentives last week with All Games Are Comedies. Dan discusses how this all relates to why games struggle with tragedy (in the classical sense), a thread which is taken up by Ari and ~hellfire~ in comments here as well. It’s a meaty question.

The same blog also has an older post called Games Are Languages, from the epic Games Aren’t Clocks thread, in which Dan straight up starts analyzing games as finite state machines. This is so hardcore I can’t handle it. He ends on a point I disagree with, by arguing that the performance of a player through said state machine can be a work of art, but the state machine itself is not. Me, I have no problem appreciating the aesthetic qualities of a state machine, as well as a particular execution of it. I’d say that’s pretty much what I do here.

Justin Keverne has a very thoughtful post on a Framework for Systemic Storytelling (Part 2). I haven’t read Part 1, but this seems really solid to me. This kind of simulation-driven story space is something I keep arguing for, but I haven’t seen its requirements articulated quite so well before. Lots of interesting implications to chew over.

In The Constraint History of Digital Games, Chris Bateman writes about how hardware and social factors played into the development of game genres over time. As with the best of Bateman’s writing, it cuts past a bunch of silly holywars stuff to get to some practical reasons why games are the way they are.

Finally, the first part of Brendan Keogh’s article on a game jam in Brisbane is just a great, really entertaining read. I’ve always been curious about what it’s like to do one of these things, but they don’t seem suited to the “spend an hour sketching plans in comments, write ten lines, then thoughtfully puff on a cigar” style of games programming that I specialize in.

Readings: Lost in Transition

I’ve been neglecting the old blog for a while, due to a combination of work piling up and not being able to get back into my old routine. But I’m back, hello! Here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I was gone.

A Fate That We Deserve: Choice, Triumph, and All That Remains. This is the fourth of an excellent series by Alex R. on the subject of Dragon Age 2. The series starts with a detailed analysis of the dialogue system, including several nuances I’m only starting to notice now on my second playthrough. This last entry is on how the story constraints affect roleplaying. If you’ve got one of these tragic conditions where combat animations and reusable sets temporarily disengage your frontal cortex, this series is a damn good cure.

The Fantasy Cyborg: Reading Passing Narratives in Dragon Age. There’s more close Dragon Age analysis over at Alternate Ending, where Mattie Brice digs into the treatment of mages and “passing” in the games as a metaphor for mixed-race and transgendered narratives. Great stuff, and very helpful to my current playthrough, a mage who’s struggling to figure out where he falls along this continuum.

History Lesson: Takeshi no Chosenjo. Fraser Elliot on the most insane game ever made, courtesy of multimedia madman Takeshi Kitano. This thing sounds like something from Lucky Wander Boy. I think I’m in love.

A Disappearing History. An interesting piece by Justin Keverne on the struggle of game preservation given the current trend to integrate multiplayer elements with single-player games. Keverne raises a good point that, more and more, the experience of playing a game changes drastically over time. Adrian Forest responded with A Time and a Place for Multiplayer Gaming, which tries to place this question in the context of preservation of performances. Keverne objects in a lively comment thread.

Keverne’s argument is that he’s not interested in preserving performances, but in preserving the ability for a player ten or twenty years down the line to experience the game like a player does today. To which I’d say, that isn’t possible now. My experience of Planescape: Torment in 2011 is unavoidably shaped by the years I’ve spent playing more recent games, and those years alter how I approach the interface and the mechanics. This isn’t unique to games by any stretch. You have to learn how to watch silent films, and even when you do, you can never recreate the experience of watching a silent film when that’s the only kind of film you’ve ever seen, when there’s a live piano player and a rowdy audience around you, when the projection booth could catch fire at any moment but you’re taking the risk because you can’t beat two hours of entertainment for a dime, not in this day and age.

For this reason, I think Keverne’s ideal of a game being playable forever – even for ten years – is a little quixotic. Even the most hermetically sealed single-player game or the most enthusiastically maintained multiplayer server can’t change the fact that game experiences are going to change as the context changes, sometimes enormously. And many, many games will get lost as playable experiences as servers shut down, platforms die out, and emulator projects get abandoned. Going forward, preservation efforts should include attempts both to keep code playable and to record performances, as Forest argues. But maintaining the playability of an entire game as it was on release day isn’t the most realistic or necessary goal.

 

Weekly Update: Blocks World

After two weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone paper writing, I am delighted to return to writing that no one will pay me for with Players Are Planners, a new feature up at Robot Geek. This was inspired by a volley of blog posts that went down while I was away, starting with Michael Abbot’s Games Aren’t Clocks and followed by Dennis Scimeca’s Games ARE Clocks and Kate Cox’s Win, Lose, Or Fail. As is frequently the case, this post came together over beers in a loud bar with my boyfriend, and I must credit him for part of the argument here. Also, I apologize in advance if I haven’t quite shaken off the academic tone. Or should I say: under hypothetical circumstances in which a somewhat academic tone has been employed in relation to writing, the current work argues that apologies are a potentially appropriate solution [32].

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week, other than that kind of thing.

On process intensity and procedural narrative. Procedural narrative is hard. Robert Yang does a rundown of the workarounds people have come up with to make stories feel procedural without digging into the ugly stuff, with advantages and disadvantages of each approach. A valuable resource for anyone concerned with procedural stories.

Guessing Games. An interview at Kill Screen with the developer of a game in which you guess the race of a person in a photograph. This actually strikes me as a good idea for a political game (most political games do not strike me this way).

How Can We Understand Code as a “Critical Artifact”? Also via Kill Screen, an interview by Henry Jenkins with an academic at USC who is studying the aesthetics of code. This is something I heard about a while ago at the day job, so it’s interesting to check in on it again. Ultimately I think it would be hard to develop an aesthetics of games without including something about aesthetic qualities of code.

5 Film-School Violations in Videogame Cut-Scenes. Makin’ fun of cutscenes, by Jason Schreier. This kind of thing is entertaining, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to start applying rules of thumb from filmmaking to scenes in a game. I think cutscenes are an awkward hack as it is, but if they are to be used, I doubt it makes sense to measure them by the same criteria as movie scenes. Movies and games have different needs. Information doesn’t need to be fast in a game; it needs to be useful. And movie-style pacing is a ridiculous metric to apply when players go through a game at their own pace.

Weekly Update: Non-Linear Trend

Haha, I was totally kidding last week when I said I’d get a real post together for today. Fortunately there are people out there who are writing things. Go read things they write! I’ma go die.

In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column. This is a week late, but someone just pointed me to this interesting New York Times article on computer-generated news stories. Apparently they’re getting good enough to make money on. This may seem tangential, but I think this kind of work will be very relevant to procedural narrative in the long run.

Ludonarrative Resonance. Mattie Brice expands her thoughts on game narratives, and tries to reframe the word “emergent.” I’m skeptical about the need to redefine a perfectly cromulent word, but I’ll admit that the concept to which she’s applying it – the implicit rhythms of mechanics – probably does need to be named.

The Importance of Immersion. Over at Robot Geek, Nick Kakolowski does some reframing of his own in talking about different types of immersion. I like seeing this concept get expanded past sensory immersion, which is how it’s usually used.

To My Someday Daughter. An epic tale, much linked, of Magic: The Gathering player Geordie Tait trying to dig himself and his subculture out of a sexist mindset. He’s not quite there yet, as this reaction from When I Grow Up points out. But it’s both fascinating and heartening to see someone working through it so openly. A nice coda to the redankulous Alyssa Bereznak affair.

Weekly Update: Non-Linear

So hey, on account of some deadlines at my day job, I’ll be lying pretty low for the next couple of weeks. No post at Robot Geek this week, but I’ll see if I can’t throw something together for next week. (e.g., “How Not Playing Videogames for Two Weeks Makes People Go Crazy,” or perhaps something like, “Gamification and Paper-Writing: Apparently This Was a Terrible Idea!”)

As an excellent substitute, please enjoy some of the fine stuff I’ve been reading this week.

Rowan Kaiser’s in-depth analysis of Dragon Age: Origins. Great rundown of the narrative mechanics (and mechanical problems) of a game I can never get enough of picking apart.

Goddammit, Chris Bateman’s writing about how games can’t make you cry again! Hogwash! Anyhow, it kicked off a damn good discussion in comments, culminating in this stellar response from Sparky Clarkson.

Michael Abbot argues that Games Aren’t Clocks. This piece bugs me for reasons I can’t quite pin down yet. Yeah, maybe it’s unfair to judge every game by its mechanics. But if we don’t, are we ever going to develop an aesthetic of mechanics? Or will it just be easier to give up and criticize everything like it’s a novel?

Mattie Brice and I disagree on a lot of things when it comes to RPGs; especially on whether the illusion of choice is a crafty hack worth striving for, or unacceptable halfassery. Mattie makes the argument for the latter position (among other things) in An Apology for RPGs.

Arrin Dembo has the definitive post on Dead Island‘s Feminist Whore controversy. I bet a couple of guys found that super-hilarious after twenty hours of programming. Let’s all take this moment to remember that embedding jokes in your code is never, ever a good idea. I mean, if someone’s reading your code after you’re done with it, there’s a good chance they’re already mad at you. Either because they’re looking for bugs, or because they’re trying to do something with it and your structure makes no goddamn sense to anyone outside of your team.

Weekly Update: This Ends Nothing!

This week at Robot Geek, I discuss the recent fake findings about how rarely players finish games in the context of narrative theory in Ending vs. Resolution. (Sorry about the video ads. We’re working on it.)  Some of this is inspired by some weird behavior I’ve noticed in my own play style. With a lot of the games I most love, I get right up to the very ending, the very last boss, and close up the game and never touch it again. I’ve always wondered what the deal is with that, and this post has a theory about it.

So here’s what I’m reading this week.

Everybody’s Doing It. Jon Irwin writes in Kill Screen about losing his Ocarina of Time virginity years after all the other kids.

Eric Swain’s excellent review of p0nd made me see the game in a new light.

Fraser Elliot has in interesting historical perspective on the development of the third-person shooter genre at Robot Geek.

Argument Maps for Unscripted Conversation. Over at Gamasutra, Ron Newcomb has an approach to game arguments that contrasts sharply with the one I described last week. Interesting stuff, but I maintain that true knowledge representations like this don’t scale! Via Mattie Brice.

A great, wide-ranging interview with Ken Rolston at AusGamers, which I tweeted earlier this week. I’ve clipped my favorite part below, but the entire thing is pretty awesome.

Let me draw you a graph on the video of interactivity in a dialogue [gesturing] there’s the graph and time passes; and you input; and time passes; and you input. Even if you’re moving, you’re constantly doing inputs and choices. It is probably the worst part of gaming in any role-playing game. And at the same time, not only is it bad for interactivity, it’s bad in modelling the complexity of this relationship.

You and I are talking; we’re in a dialogue; there are a lot of different ways it can go. It’s only a branching tree in a computer game; you bring a lot to the experience. When you become attached to characters, you are a willing suspension of disbelief. And I blame you for not being filled with rage, screaming “this isn’t good enough”. And at the same time, I promise you I’m not going to give you one, because it would not — in a triple-A game — be possible for me to build a compelling model of a human being that you could interact with.

Weekly Update: Slow Lives and Nagging Wives

What’s up, travelers from Gamasutra! This week at Robot Geek, I talk about an emerging cliché in art games, where it comes from, and what it’s good for. I call them Leaning Games, and they’re multiplying like rabbits. (If that phrasing just grossed out a few people who follow me on Twitter, bonus!) I don’t really have a problem with clichés, mind you. I just think they usually reveal something interesting about the creative culture that produces them.

As an aside, I think there’s a lot of room for a gender-based critique of these types of games, which keep circling back to the story of a guy who either neglects his wife or his job. That’s not my area of specialty, but it’s a weird trend worth noting.

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week.

Rampant Coyote asks whether subtlety is possible or desirable in games. This is a question I initially scoffed at, until I realized how hard it is to come up with examples where subtlety does work, even in the wild world of experimentals. Can anyone else think of something?

Via Mattie Brice, Altug Isigan applies classical narrative theory to games in Game Narrativity and Interaction.

Indiana Jones and the Video Game Imagination. Over at Robot Geek, Fraser Elliott writes about how children approach games and what it says about how we approach them as adults.

Weekly Update: Dying Is Easy

This week at Robot Geek, I talk about comedy in games in Dying Is Easy. It’s an extension of an offhand remark from this post, and a topic I’ll probably revisit at some point. Comedy is fascinating!

So here’s what I’m reading this week.

Art restoration… er, game modification? Chris Johnson tries to figure out where game mods fit between the restoration of an existing work and the creation of something entirely new, especially in the era of rampant DLC.

With Great Power Comes Greater Expectations. Rampant Coyote extends the concept of the Uncanny Valley to realism in game design, for a thoughtful discussion of how the demands of players shift with a game’s presentation.

Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto.  Brendan Keogh on a recent scandalous panel on game criticism at the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Keogh pivots off the panel’s shortcomings to address what game criticism should and should not be.