In my last post on tragedy, The Wrong Ending, I presented what I saw as an essential problem of tragedy in videogames: an ending where things go badly is often seen by players as wrong, and therefore in need of fixing. This makes it hard for a tragic ending to seem like a valid choice for players. I also promised that I’d be back to discuss some questions I raised at the end of that post:

So how do you get a player to pick the wrong ending? More importantly, how do you get her to do that and still care?

In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem. These strategies all boil down to addressing the problem of how to keep a player from trying to fix what they did wrong. The games I discuss are ones I’m familiar with, and by no means an exhaustive set, so please do comment with other examples and strategies that don’t fit these four types. Spoilers for both Mass Effect and both Dragon Age games, Fallout 3, and the indie horror Downfall follow after the jump, although I’ll keep them as ambiguous as possible. Dan.

We Were Always Doomed

The crudest strategy for getting players to pick a tragic option without feeling that they need to fix their choice is simply to present a situation with no good options. This is a favorite of the Dragon Age series so far. The ending of Dragon Age: Origins, for example, gives you several choices, but the best you can say is that one of them appears to be putting off the disaster until a few sequels down the line. Dragon Age 2 is even blunter in forcing you to pick the lesser of two evils and making it clear that the world is boned either way.

The advantage of this strategy is that you might not feel as though you’re missing out on the “best” ending, since the options are just bad in different ways. This is also a disadvantage, however. If there isn’t a better path visible from where you’re standing, the emotional impact of the tragic ending won’t hit as hard. Tragedy isn’t just the feeling that things went badly, it’s the feeling that things went badly and you could have prevented it.

That said, players may be inclined to perceive a “right” ending among any set of varying possibilities. This seems to be the case with Dragon Age: Origins, which I believe makes it less successful as a tragedy for many players. That doesn’t mean that they agree about the right ending, however. Tossing the question out to Twitter revealed a wide range in what players perceived as the best or canonical ending from Dragon Age‘s eight or so possibilities. This wasn’t necessarily based on which was the happiest ending, but rather, factors like how interesting the ending was, dialogue bugs that revealed default conditions, and beliefs about what the morally right thing to do was.

Players have different criteria by which they determine the right ending and whether they’ve deviated from it. Learning more about those criteria and how to exploit them is an intriguing possibility for increasing the emotional impact of a tragic ending.

Bait and Switch

To some extent, the sense that one of Dragon Age‘s endings must be the right one derives from game conventions. We’re used to there being a good ending and some bad endings; in many older games, these endings would be associated with different point values that made this ranking explicit. You still see this in retro adventure games like A Tale of Two Kingdoms, but for the most part it has vanished from AAA games. Still, old habits die hard.

The Tenpenny Towers quest from Fallout 3 is a killer example of a tragic storyline that directly exploits this convention. The quest initially appears to have two bad endings and one good one: a compromise solution that makes everyone happy. When I played the game, I worked towards this solution and traipsed off into the Wasteland, smug in my good karma and diplomatic abilities. When I heard on the radio that things had gone horribly at Tenpenny, I furiously assumed that a story flag had been set incorrectly, and ran back to check on the bug. But all that had happened is that one of the factions had taken my compromise solution as an opening for an attack. Plausible enough, and a tight little tragedy where my tragic flaw was naivete.

This is a trick that may not work forever, should conventions change. For now, though, it’s a clever way to treat the player’s search for the best ending as a solution rather than a problem. Like the Dragon Age strategy, it uses a lack of good endings to push the player into a bad ending. But making one of those endings look better avoids the apathy that can arise from the explicitly “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” presentation of Dragon Age 2, and makes the player feel more responsible for how things turn out. For what it’s worth, it’s possible that the Origins ending is trying to pull this trick at a much longer time scale, which brings me to the next strategy.

The Long Con

If the basic problem with tragedy in games is that players want to fix things they did wrong, there are two obvious ways around that. The first is to make things unfixable, which is what the first two strategies do. The second is to make fixing things really, really unpleasant. That lies at the heart of strategies that put a great deal of game time between the tragic mistake and its consequences. By the time you realize what you’ve done wrong, it’s too late to go back and change things without repeating a great deal of the game. Replaying the game is a harsh punishment for players, since it’s both annoying and severely breaks immersion. Putting enough time between mistake and consequence almost guarantees that the player will give up and live with the consequences.

A straightforward and brutal example of this strategy is found in the indie horror game Downfall, which unfortunately seems to be unavailable for download at this time. (For this reason heavy spoilers will follow, since I can’t expect others to have played it.) Downfall is a stylish point-and-click adventure game in which you mostly play as one character. At one point, the lead is buried alive in a coffin with a shotgun while scrabbling noises are heard outside. This being a horror game, you’re inclined to believe the worst about what’s coming to get you. The scrabbling gets closer, and you’re suddenly given the choice to fire the shotgun or not. As I recall, you have a limited amount of time to make this decision, and while the timer ticks down, nearby ghosts taunt you about the monsters outside. It’s stressful. For what it’s worth, I fired.

Whatever you choose, the game abruptly cuts to an entirely different character and her own problems. You play as this character for quite a while, learn her backstory, and get to know her. She’s being guided by some kind of spirit on a quest of her own. Eventually it becomes clear that the endpoint of this quest is digging up the grave where the protagonist is trapped in order to free him. Dread sets in. Indeed, if you chose to fire the gun earlier, you blow your new friend’s head off right as she saves your life. For good measure, her headless corpse follows you around for the rest of the game.

I felt terrible. I wanted to take my decision back. But I also didn’t want to play through twenty minutes of goddamn point-and-click adventuring over again. So she stayed dead, and I went on feeling guilty about it. The tragedy hit, and all it took was a bit of time.

Other players may have more fortitude than I in this case, and there’s no guarantee that twenty minutes or so will do the trick. But as the decision-to-consequence distance increases, fewer players will be willing to go back. This appears to be one of the operating strategies of the Mass Effect series, where many decisions made in the first two games will seemingly only have their full effect in the final game. Stretching the consequence distance across eighty hours or more leaves only the most devout players willing to go back in time to fix things (what’s up, my Twitter feed). Others will prefer to just live with the consequences of their actions, even if they get a darker ending for it.

A variation on this strategy is also used within the first Mass Effect, in the scene in which your party member Wrex can be killed. It’s easy to avoid this happening if you’ve put enough skill points into one of your persuasion talents. However, many players who focused on combat skills instead found themselves unable to save Wrex. I find this to be a particularly effective strategy, since it follows not from a big explicit decision, but from a series of small choices over time about how to build your character. This makes it more difficult to go back and try again, since the point where things went wrong may be hard to identify. It also feels more earned, since it honestly follows from the type of person you chose to be. Your character’s flaws caused this.

Where Did I Go Wrong?

The scenario surrounding Wrex’s death is unusual among the storylines I’ve listed in that it doesn’t hinge on a single obvious decision point. Nonetheless, the game’s interface does explain where you went wrong: not having enough persuasion skill means that the conversation options that avoid bloodshed are visible, but disabled. You could push this strategy further by removing that explanation. A character would die, and you would feel like you could have avoided it, but you might not be clear on precisely where you screwed up. This is one last strategy to keep the player from fixing the tragic event: prevent them from knowing how to fix it.

It’s the strategy used to a degree in the ending sequence of Mass Effect 2. Prior to this sequence, the game tells you repeatedly that getting more loyal party members means that you increase your chances of survival, but that’s all the information you get. When the ending arrives, you’re thrown into a rather messy mix of loyalty flags, decisions, and random rolls that contribute to whether or not a given party member makes it out alive. By replaying the sequence and comparing notes with other players you can figure out the possibility space and get a perfect run, but on an initial blind playthrough there’s too much going on to easily trace your mistakes.

This is a great strategy in theory, and I found it effective myself. I liked the feeling of being overwhelmed and having events going awry despite best intentions. But that “comparing notes with other players” thing is a bit of a fatal flaw. Every game has a FAQ, and if you give players an ambiguous system, they will always figure it out eventually. And some players will always be tempted by the prospect of getting the right ending, even if (or especially because) it’s hard to get.

* * *

 At heart, pulling off a tragedy in a game is about manipulating the player into accepting a situation they don’t want while still making them feel responsible for it. This is no small feat, but it’s not impossible by any means. None of the examples I listed are really immune to the basic “reload and fix it” issue that threatens to rob game tragedy of its impact, but they all suggest methods for making that solution less desirable. Digging into why they do and do not work might lead to better strategies down the line.

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.

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?

It’s called the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, created by Erick Wujcik, and I was taken with it pretty much immediately. I read through the manual over the last couple of weeks and came away pretty intrigued by the concept. (If not by Zelazny’s books, which appear to be remarkably awful if the excerpts in the game manual are representative.) There’s a lot to the system, and much of it isn’t something I’m interested in copying. But I love how it handles determining the success of actions without using dice. Having read the manual, it’s actually both simpler and more nuanced than how it’s described in the Wikipedia page.

Here’s the basic idea: anytime a character tries to do something and is opposed by another character, you look at the difference between their relevant stats. The amount of that difference determines the extent of the effect. So, for example, if they’re wrestling and character X tries to break character Y’s neck, you compare X and Y’s Strength attribute. The Game Master (GM) might determine the outcome as follows:

• X is a lot stronger than Y:  Y is killed outright.
• X is a little stronger than Y:  Y is badly hurt, but not killed.
• X and Y are equally strong: Y is hurt, but still has a chance to fight X off.
• X is a little weaker than Y:  Y is unharmed, and X loses his footing.
• X is a lot weaker than Y: Y is unharmed and gets X is badly hurt in retaliation.

As I said on Twitter and in comments on the last post, I suspect that in practice, with a human GM, this probably results in the GM deciding whatever and a lot of subsequent arguing. But with a computer taking the role of the GM, this sounds fantastic to me! In a way, this is what D&D-style systems do in a very roundabout way. If your stats match up poorly against an opponent, you’re more likely to miss or do very little damage; if they match up favorably, you’re more likely to do a lot of damage. Amber just does that in a deterministic way, rather than using probability represented by the dice roll. As of now, I plan to adopt a similar system in Mouthwash: ranked versions of every skill effect that are selected based on stat disparity.

My new obsession has led to a lot of debates with my boyfriend about what it means to abandon the element of randomness in a game like this. He’s more skeptical about the idea than I am, and worries that an essentially deterministic system will inevitably lead to players finding a single optimal path and running for it. To which I say, eh. I’d rather make that path hard to get to by designing a complex system, rather than introducing a bunch of randomness. After all, the randomness in a D&D game is there to represent all the subtle environmental factors that a human Dungeon Master can’t hope to calculate. The more well-simulated that environment gets in a computer game, the less necessary the dice rolls become. If your character can physically move around a space with a complex shadow-and-lighting model, and you can simulate the visibility of the character to NPCs using that model, then you don’t really need to roll dice for stealth checks. What does the dice roll add at that point?

So since I’m going to all this trouble to simulate a complex social environment in Mouthwash, dice rolls don’t appeal to me. There’s also another problem: randomness in a combat game adds unpredictability to a world, but randomness in Mouthwash would add unpredictability to characters. Unpredictability in characters is pretty easy to read as “poor characterization.” For that reason alone I’m pretty set on using an Amber-like system.

Of course, that means I’m putting a pretty heavy burden on the complexity of the game system. And that’s starting to give me headaches. Complexity is great, but only when it feels like the system hangs together tightly. Otherwise it’s just chaos. So far I haven’t thought seriously about how to get things to hang together. How do emotions affect viewpoints? How do viewpoints affect goals? Where do relationships fit in? I’ve just been designing all these separate pieces in a pretty divergent way, and not looking at the big picture. That’ll have to change.

The holy grail is that system that’s easy to learn and hard to master, and fun to experiment with in between. Manageable complexity. That means a big picture that a player can easily grasp with lots of interesting details that aren’t obvious right away. It’s a tall order, but one that I’ll be better off working out sooner rather than later. So what’s the big picture of Mouthwash? More on that when I figure it out!

So the blog’s been a bit on the sporadic side lately and, in all honesty, it probably will be until after Thanksgiving. My apologies! On the upside, something pretty grand has been happening while I was away. Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, with the help of commenter Ari, has taken some rough ideas in my post on Moral Incentives and Story Structure and made something terrific out of them. In a series of posts  at his blog, Dan and Ari have been seriously tackling a question that I raised sort of tangentially: can a videogame be a tragedy? If so, how would you design such a game?

Some highlights from this rich discussion include What Happens Next, in which Dan takes on the issue of asymmetrical knowledge in tragedies, game-based or otherwise; Tragedy Drivers, which discusses some of the design constraints on a tragic game; and Flaws in Virtual Tragedy, which directly applies concepts from Aristotle’s Poetics to the debate. It’s all awesome stuff, go read it. A lot of what we’ve been talking about so far, both at Digital Ephemera and here, boils down to how interactivity philosophically clashes with the basic assumptions of tragedy as Aristotle saw them. I’d like to jump off Dan’s thoughts on asymmetrical knowledge and talk about some of the practical issues with designing tragic games.

To start with, let’s lay out some basic premises about tragedy in games:

1. The emotional impact of tragedy comes from a cosmic punishment of an essentially sympathetic protagonist’s fatal flaw.
2. In games, punishment of the protagonist lacks impact unless the player is punished as well.
3. Players tend to optimize systems, all else being equal.

Premise #1 comes from Aristotle, basically. Premises #2 and #3 are perhaps more arguable, and are certainly not universal. However, they do represent important general differences between game players and other sorts of audiences.

When you take these three premises together, you start to see some of the problems that games have with presenting tragedy in a meaningful way. You can have something tragic happen to the protagonist without any consequences for the player, as in Shadow of the Colossus. Your feeling of hard-earned victory contrasted with Wander’s inevitable downfall creates a dissonance between the player and the avatar that Colossus uses to great effect, but it isn’t quite the same thing as classical tragedy. The effect on the audience of classical tragedy derives from sympathy with the protagonist; if you and the protagonist are pulling in different directions, this effect can’t be recreated.

The solution, then, is to punish the player as well as the protagonist. But how do you do this? You can’t just change the emotional tone of a cutscene and call that punishing the player. The player is in this for engagement, and sad things can be just as engaging as happy things. To punish the player meaningfully, you have to affect gameplay. You can take resources away, forcing the player to change her strategy. You can take content away, so that the player sees less of the story or game world under certain circumstances. You can make the game more difficult (which may be a punishment or a reward, depending on the player). You can make the player’s quest goals go unfulfilled. There’s a lot you can do, and many games have tried these tactics and others.

That said, as Dan points out, if something bad inevitably happens to the player, there’s no cosmic punishment. For the full tragic effect, the downfall has to be a consequence of the hero’s flaw or mistake. There needed to be a point where the downfall could have been avoided. But as soon as that’s the case, premise #3 jumps in and ruins everything: if there’s a sequence of events where the player gets less stuff, however stuff is defined, players will always view that sequence as “wrong.” This is a common complaint in RPGs with morality systems: usually, being a dick means you take on fewer quests, so why would you want to be a dick? If you get punished for some behavior in a game, well, that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. To optimize the system, you have to avoid the mistake.

It’s not that players won’t sometimes pursue a “wrong” path, for kicks or to get an achievement or to see different versions of the story. The problem is that their reasons for doing so have a tendency to be lighthearted, precisely because the path seems wrong to them. It’s a diversion on the way to to the correct ending. Dan’s post describes a common experience with Mass Effect 2, in which the player initially gets an ending where several team members die and later goes back for a second playthrough where the team survives. Since this ending will be imported into Mass Effect 3, getting it right is particularly important to many players.

Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and expressing her own emotions. She’s also capable of taking simple steps to meet those goals, provided she has access to a skill that will instantly produce the intended effect.

What’s going on in this exchange is that Maryam initially has the “make Roni happy” goal. Since she doesn’t know Roni’s emotional state, she uses a skill (Query Emotion) that will give her that information. Questions, when successful, have the effect of giving the listener the goal of providing the given information to the speaker. So when Roni dodges Maryam’s query with one of her own, Maryam now has the goal “express my emotion.” She does so, and is now happy because she achieved a goal. This also makes her old “make Roni happy” goal the new active goal, so she asks for the information again, and this time gets it: Roni is calm.

And that’s where things fall apart, because Maryam doesn’t actually have any skills that can make Roni happy. The bit where she says “Oh no, I’m incapable of making plans!” is just an error message triggered when the agent can’t generate any moves. (Roni ends the conversation by lying, but that’s not important right now.) This is a point in the development of this system that opens up a few questions, which I’ll be tangling with for the next week or so. Namely:

1. How should skill effects work?

2. Should I have a class system or not?

3. What’s the best way to handle AI plan-making?

Question #3 is going to take some trial and error more than anything else, so let’s put that aside for now. Questions #1 and #2 are a little more philosophical. I intended from the start to have classes in Mouthwash, but I’m starting to question that. There was a bit of talk on Twitter last night about Skyrim‘s abandonment of classes in favor of pure skill-based character development. It sounded like a good idea to me – god knows I’ve never played an Elder Scrolls game with anything other than a custom-classed character – and I started wondering why I was so stuck on classes in my system. I suppose I’d always thought of it as a way to organize skills and make the possibility space of character development less intimidating to a player, especially given that this is going to be kind of a weird system. But maybe that’s unnecessary, and I can get that organization with skill trees without putting up walls between classes?

The most urgent question is #1, as I’ll be working on it today. At this point, since I’m just testing things out, skills are always successful. But pretty soon I’ll need a way to make that success dependent on character ability and the situation. I’ve always figured that I’d use a quasi-D&D-ish system for skill effects. That is, there’s some chance of success for each action based on the stats of the speaker and the listener, plus any other buffs or debuffs in effect. But then I imagine a big conversation with more than two speakers, all with potentially conflicting goals and play styles, and I wonder if there’s not enough uncertainty in the dynamics of that system without dragging random rolls into it.

So, what do you think of classes vs. skill-based systems? Is there a good way to design a system that takes character stats into account without using dice rolls?  Let me know your thoughts!

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.

Being slow with the blog for a while means my backlog of experimental games has grown even more overwhelming. Today I’ll be covering some games from the June Experimental Gameplay Project, theme “MASHUP,” so you can see how far behind I am. There’s nothing for it but to keep pushing forward against all odds!

Squirrels with Machine Guns and Towers of the Prophet

Most of the June games took the theme in a pretty straightforward direction, mashing up two genres to see how the mechanics combined. For that reason, there weren’t any mind-blowers this month, but it was a great platform for simple gameplay experiments. One thing I found curious is that I really enjoyed both Squirrels and Towers, which use tower defense as one half of their equations, despite the fact that tower defense is perhaps my least favorite game genre. Luke O’Connor’s Squirrels combines it with a quirky platforming thing, while Towers by M.C. Spross combines it with an RPG.  It’s the latter that I could see really destroying my life, if it were polished up. This would seem to imply that my problem with tower defense games is just the inability to run around doing stuff that relates to the defense-building. I’ll never be a real strategist.

BookwormTris and Coglitz

Another theme this month is games that I found instantly addictive. Along with Towers of the Prophet, this includes BookwormTris, the Scrabble/Tetris mashup from Steve Gargolinski. The control scheme is quite awkward, but it sucked about half an hour of my life away. I’m told there are commercial games in this mold, but I’m furiously trying to forget that information for the sake of my health and productivity. I don’t think I’m familiar with the source games for Jonathan Giroux’s Coglitz, but it’s similarly difficult, awkward, and impossible to put down. Are mashups a good path to addictive gameplay? It makes sense. You get hooked on a game when it can be picked up easily but is hard to master. Combining two familiar gameplay styles could be a shortcut to that.

Life

The artists were remarkably well behaved this month, but it just wouldn’t be an Experimental Gameplay Project without at least one game that flips off the theme, jumps out the window, and comes up with something neat. Arnaud de Bock’s Life doesn’t seem like much in its component parts: you’re a spermy thing, you collect stuff, things fall apart for no reason around you, and there are a lot of collision bugs. Yet it all adds up to something that doesn’t feel much like anything else. It also has quite a striking visual style, as seen above.

Impasse

Games where your movement changes the environment are surprisingly hard. It’s inherently confusing when an action with well-known consequences is suddenly given consequences outside of its usual behavior. Impasse, a slick little puzzle game by Wanderlands, has a nicely stripped-down mechanic that uses that confusion to good effect. The levels are small and well-designed enough that you don’t lose your mind following the mechanics. They’re hard enough to follow on their own.

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.