Critical Damage

Why You Should Help Mattie Brice Get To GDC

2012-01-29T23:08:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of excellent writers writing lots of excellent things about videogames. You already know this. Across blogs there is a vastly diverse collection of writers looking at games from all different kinds of angles and making all different kinds of insights.

But when it comes to the bigger, professional sites, everybody is just too agreeable. It's not that people are writing poor articles or saying things that are uninteresting, but, simply, there are just too many of us from similar backgrounds saying similar things while the dissenters, saying equally interesting but perhaps not as agreeable things, are stuck on their blogs.

Slowly but surely this is changing. It has to change if videogame criticism is to advance and mature. We need more writers approaching more videogames from more perspectives. And, more importantly, we need these writers to have exposure and actually be read.

This is why I am super excited that there is a fundraising effort to get Mattie Brice to GDC this year. Mattie appeared out of nowhere in 2010 and is now writing for a range of places. She's all over Popmatters; She writes candidly about sexuality and games on Nightmare Mode; and she's even had the guts to take on Kotaku's cesspit comment sections head on.

I don't always agree with what she writes, and sometimes her forward-gazing optimism just outright frustrates me. But this is exactly why games journalism/criticism/whatever needs her and those writers like her: she is saying interesting things that many of us wouldn't say. She is starting interesting discussions and debates with the mainstrea about topics previously left to lurk on the niche blogs.

GDC is the biggest annual event in the game's industry and is exactly the place any budding game's writer needs to be if they want to Make It as a games journalist. 2010 was the first year I went to GDC and in the eleven months since I have written for Edge, Paste, Ars Technica, and a whole heap of other amazing outlets I could never have imagined writing for a year ago.

If we can help get Mattie there this year, I don't doubt she will have just as many opportunities out of it as I did, if not more. She has already marched confidently onto a stack of mainstream websites with very alternative views, and attending GDC will only help bring her alternative, interesting writing to larger and larger readerships.

So this is why you should chip in a few dollars and help get Mattie to GDC. Do it for games journalism/criticism. Help expand the angles and voices and articles and topics that people are writing and reading about. Games criticism needs more dissenters, and there are few dissenters writing at present with as much potential as Mattie.

(Also, huge thanks are owed to David Carlton who got the whole ball rolling on this.)

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part Five

2012-01-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

So concludes the countdown of my person top twenty favourite games of 2011. This is the fifth and final post in the series, leading on from parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

4. Jetpack Joyride (Half Brick)

If you were to ask me what the greatest iOS game of all time is, I would answer Jetpack Joyride immediately. I wouldn’t even need to think about it. There are so many varied, surprising, and phenomenal games on the app store but none come close to the polish of Jetpack Joyride. Taking a few elements of Half Brick’s earlier title Monster Dash and remixing it with a whole heap of new features, Jetpack Joyride is the most complete, thorough, polished, addictive, entertaining Canabaltesque game ever.

Its goals are multilayered, giving the player something of a choice as to what they are actually aiming for. On the surface you are just trying to get as far as you can. You touch the screen to engage the jetpack’s thrust and release to fall as you weave and manoeuvre around the various obstacles. But then there are the missions, which act as kind of in-game achievements. You have three active at any one time, and completing them works towards levelling you up and rewarding you with cash and trinkets that can then be spent on different jetpacks or other various items. Then there are all the vehicles, each with its own unique controls and feel. Then the actual achievements. Then the slot machine.

Jetpack Joyride has taken the Canabaltesque genre and made it about so much more than simply getting as far as you can. But more than that, what makes Jetpack Joyride really stand out is the level of detail in its audiovisual design. From the scientists running around, to the way the Little Stomper smashes the glass floor when it lands, to the ‘ch-ch!’ of Barry reloading his shotgun singlehandedly while on the hog. All the polish and features and tight design come together exquisitely so that Jetpack Joyride simply feels good.

My stats recently got wiped in a transfer hiccup between my old and new iPhones, but I don’t doubt I have played the game for well over 30 hours now, more than most of the AAA games I bought this year. In fact, Jetpack Joyride is largely responsible in convincing me to make this one list for AAA, indie, and iOS games rather than separating them. When a small development team who literally work about ten blocks from my house can make a game for my telephone that captivates me no less than the multi-gazillion-dollar, multi-studio games that cost literally a hundred times more, it certainly seems foolish to treat iOS games as second-class citizens.

Strangely, considering how much I love it, the only thing I really wrote about Jetpack Joyride this year was a somewhat negative musing about the representation of science in popular culture, specifically in recent videogames. I also enjoyed Jason Killingsworth’s blog post, which is a guide to maximising your Jetpack Joyride high-score. It’s a short but interesting read just because it takes into account so many little things both inside and outside of the game. Jason is sitting well atop my Games Center leaderboard for this game, and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon, so you can trust him on this.

3. Bastion (Super Giant Games)

When I saw Bastion at the IGF Pavilion at GDC, I was not particularly fussed. It just looked like a cutesy Diablo clone with some trippy visuals.

Of course, back then I was just watching over someone’s shoulder, and the player was wearing earphones, so I couldn’t hear the most crucial element of Bastion: its narration. I assumed Bastion’s primary pleasure would be that of a grinding RPG, not of a fascinating story and world. I didn’t even know about the narrator until it finally came out on Xbox Live Arcade months later. But then I purchased it and played it through twice in three days, and I decided there and then that it was my GOTY-so-far. Any games that came out after Bastion would be judged against it for GOTY honours (spoiler: two games topped it).

‘Beautiful’ can be such a generic, empty adjective, but there is no better word to describe Bastion. Bastion is beautiful. The style, the music, the narration, the story, the world all meld perfectly together into this beautiful, mournful work that is an absolute delight to experience.

Every element of Bastion, on its own, could be mistaken for a gimmick. The narrator turning your every action into a narrative a second later; the world putting itself together (or, more accurately, falling apart on reverse) as you step over it. At first you could mistake the story of a world fallen apart as tacked on simply to justify these audiovisual quirks, but it doesn’t take long for you to notice Bastion’s themes and narrative and gameplay resonate through the whole experience. This is about remembering a world that no longer exists, about yearning after it, about learning the tales of its dead and exploring it in segments of crumbled cobblestone and narrated nostalgia. By the time the game is over, you care about a world that was destroyed long before you first set foot in it—which is precisely how you should feel before you are stumped by the final decision you must make.

I wrote this review for Paste in practically a single draft, and it is still the review I’m most proud of this year. I also wrote this follow up post about the endgame choices and how both choices are clearly the right choice (obvious spoiler warning on that one). Ryan Kuo also wrote a phenomenal review at Kill Screen, and Mike Schiller has a very in-depth three part series analysing more closely Bastion’s elements and how they go together.. Zach Alexander also has a good summary post of the game with some interesting insights into the final moments of the game that completely passed me by. Kris Ligman’s thoughts on the narrator’s affect are well worth a read. And, finally, Nathan Grayson’s post about why every choice in Bastion is the right one says what my blog post on choice tries to say but far better.

2. Skyrim (Bethesda)

Number Two hardly seems fair for a game that, at the time of writing, I’ve sunk ninety-two hours into in only a couple of months. I rarely hit the 100 hour mark on a game, and never in such a short period of time. If I were grading games on sheer quantity of content alone, Skyrim would be Number One, no doubt. But in terms of quality, it is going to have to settle for about Number One-Point-One.

Much like Gears of War 3, Skyrim was everything I hoped it would be—no more, no less. It took the best of Morrowind and removed the worst of Oblivion. Since I first set foot in Morrowind all those years ago, I have loved exploring Tamriel and its people and its mythologies and its histories, and with each new games has come a new region. Those first steps into Skyrim filled me with this kind of giddy excitement comparable to the first time I stepped off a plane in a foreign country.

Even with previous Elder Scroll games, I have never been sucked into a virtual world as completely as I have with Skyrim. 90 hours in and I still feel like I am progressing and exploring new lands; not like I’m just grinding the endgame. I probably got to 60 hours of play before I even visited all the major cities. Skyrim is big and dense and so full of seamlessly integrated stuff that not one step that I’ve taken through the world feels like a distraction. Everything I’ve done, everywhere I’ve gone, every quest I’ve completed has forwarded the story of my character as she journeys the realm of Skyrim.

I could probably go on for quite a while more about why I love Skyrim so much, but my review for Pixel Hunt and my further thoughts say it already. I also outlined why I was so hyped for it before its release for a post on Games On Net, and I wrote about how I adapted (or failed to adapt) to its time-jumping mythology as a seasoned Elder Scrolls player on Gameranx. Mattie Brice wrote this thought-provoking piece for Popmatters about Skyrim’s quest structures and how she wants to do away with them. I can’t say I completely agree with her, but it is one of the few constructively critical pieces on Skyrim out there that goes beyond the typical and lazy generic-fanatasy-is-generic/glitches-are-glitchy/Skyrim-isn’t-Dark Souls complaints. On that note, comparing Skyrim to Dark Souls is kind of like comparing Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart because they both have cars. Anyway, Rowan Kaiser, also at Gameranx, wrote this about Skyrim’s weather (and on that note, I will say one major criticism I have of Skyrim is that, not once, have I gotten the sense that it is cold). Meanwhile, Adrian Forest wrote this detailed analysis about how Skyrim distorts spatial relations. And not articles per se, Dead End Thrills already has a spectacular collection of photographs taken within Skyrim (such as the one above), and this pseudo-photo-diary of one player’s venture beyond the invisible walls of Skyrim’s borders is an interesting read, almost as a piece of amateur virtual travel writing.

1. Modern Warfare 3 (Infinity Ward)

One attribute (or lack thereof) can almost entirely be credited with Modern Warfare 3 topping Skyrim on this list: expectations. I had a whole heap of expectations for Skyrim and not a single one for Modern Warfare 3. I never expected to enjoy Modern Warfare 3, which is dumb. I never expected to enjoy Modern Warfare before I finally got around to playing it, and then I loved it; same for Modern Warfare 2. But between Infinity Ward falling apart and my inherent game critic presumptions of “Call of Duty is dumb” that I still struggle against, I still somehow managed to assume I would not like Modern Warfare 3.

So then I came to Modern Warfare 3 with the assumption it would be dumb and I wouldn’t like it. This made that initial playthrough feel like the equivalent of taking off a blindfold and realising I’ve somehow teleported atop a rollercoaster.

The campaign was heartstopping, immersive, and visceral—all the words I’m never meant to use to describe a videogame. From the very first mission it grabbed me by the collar and pulled me through. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I had to finish the game in a single sitting. Well, if you exclude the few breaks where I just had to pause the game and walk away to let my hands stop trembling and my heartbeat slow. To be sure, Skyrim has given me ninety quality hours while Modern Warfare 3’s campaign has given me about 15 across the three times I’ve completed it. But Skyrim has not once affected my heart rate.

The pacing of each level is superb with a gradual but consistent heightening and final release of tension that I can’t describe without an orgasm analogy. Every level starts simply enough with a straightforward firefight or infiltration then escalates towards the ending in a cacophony of explosions and destruction and violin strings before that final release as you are in the helicopter or off the cliff or in the water or dead. It is absolutely insane, and I don’t exaggerate when I say that that first play of the campaign was one of my most memorable single gaming sessions of all time. It just worked.

Yet, I find it so, so, so hard to describe my love of this game. It is so easy to say why I should hate it within the boring, narrow-minded orthodoxy of what a good videogame ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ do, but it is so hard to describe why I love it. Ultimately, I think my love of the Modern Warfare series as a whole and Modern Warfare 3 in particular is a formal kind of love. It’s story is dumb and absurd, but it is told so incredibly well. The way Infinity Ward use the multiple perspectives offered by multiple characters to full affect; the way they never take you out of the action even for the most scripted segments; the way you always feel like you are in control as long as you follow your orders perfectly. You are always there looking through the eyes of one character or another as everything happens around you and to you. If you want to tell a linear story in a first-person shooter, this is how you do it: by taking away just enough power from the player so that they try to do exactly the only thing they can do. Many people deride Modern Warfare as a badly done Battlefield. For me, Modern Warfare is a superbly done Heavy Rain. I wish more people would play and appreciate the Modern Warfares and how they tell their stories so exquisitely through the medium of videogames, and then use what they learn to tell a story worth telling.

My problem is I struggle to critically deconstruct my experience as I get so sucked into it. My pleasure of Modern Warfare 3 is almost entirely uncritical, and this is problematic. In fact, I talk about this on a post at Games On Net. I can write in these horrible, vague terms about the fact that I love it, but when it comes down to pinpointing that love, I struggle to find the words. Ultimately, I think Modern Warfare 3 tells a really dumb story exceptionally well.

More notoriously, I jumped to Modern Warfare 3’s defence on a post on Kotaku Australia. Context: Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker wrote a sweepingly negative review of Modern Warfare 3 which I first read on Kotaku. It made me furious. Not because he didn’t like it, but that he thought his dislike was enough to dismiss Modern Warfare 3 as a game. So I wrote my (somewhat provocative) rebuttal, and he wrote a response to my rebuttal. I didn’t write again, but Destructoid’s Jim Sterling wrote this which sums up my frustration perfectly.

Ultimately, I think it is easy to hate a game, or to say why you hate a game. As players, it is very easy to make a game stuff up and do something it shouldn't. I could refuse to follow orders in Modern Warfare 3 or I could do the back-and-forth, level-up-alchemy-to-level-up-enchanting-ad-infinitum trick in Skyrim to get a stupidly powerful weapon ridiculously early. But why? We tend to try our hardest to break games and then complain when they don’t work. With Modern Warfare 3 I just did what I was told to do, and I had one of the most exhilarating gaming experiences of my life, and I still don’t know why or how.

And perhaps that has been the biggest lesson for me in 2011, as I have compiled a list with nearly as many iPhone games as AAA titles: it is pretty easy to hate (and to explain why you hate) a game; it is much, much harder and much, much more rewarding to love (and explain why you love) a game. This doesn’t mean we should go easy or be uncritical of games, especially ones as problematic as Modern Warfare. But perhaps we need to meet them halfway; perhaps we should be slightly less concerned with doing whatever we want to do and be slightly more concerned with trying to hear what the videogame is trying to tell us. Otherwise we are unable to account for the unique pleasures offered by the more linear and prescriptive games out there.

And those are my games of 2011! All sorted in a linear and ranked order that should not be seen in anyway absolute. All 20 of these games (and many others) have made 2011 a superb year for gaming that I can’t imagine being topped any time soon. As always, please feel free to comment with any interesting articles I’ve missed, and with your shocked and disgusted opinions on my choice for top game. Thanks for reading!

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part Four

2012-01-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

So continues the countdown of my personal favourite twenty games of 2011. This is the fourth post in the series, leading on from parts One, Two, and Three.

8. Where Is My Heart? (Die Gute Fabrik)

I first played Where Is My Heart? at the Kill Screen warehouse party during GDC. I was slightly intoxicated and incredibly tired and was not entirely sure what was happening, but it had a distinctive charm that hooked me instantly. But it wasn’t until its eventual release on PSN in November that I could finally sit down and give it the time and appreciation it not only deserves but demands.

A seemingly simple little platformer, Where Is My Heart? is most unique in how it leaves you feeling utterly mentally and physically exhausted when you play it. It hurts your head. The sliced up and scrambled tiles that you are required to view the world through require you to rearrange and make sense of the world in your head, and then hold onto that as you solve the otherwise-simple puzzle of each stage. Some levels are night impossible to conceptualise and to actually imagine how they ‘really’ look and this is all part of the theme: a blurred perception can make the most straightforward challenges seem nearly impossible.

It is a beautiful and disarming game well worth the low price asked for it on PSN, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I wrote a review of Where Is My Heart? for Edge that I was really happy with. Also, if you happen to have an old copy of Kill Screen Issue Zero around somewhere, I highly recommend reading Ryan Kuo’s interview with developer Bernie Schulenburg.

7. Forget Me Not (Nyarlu Labs)

Most iPhone games are a blast to play for a few days or weeks and then never played again. Nintendo might (and often do) complain that this means they are “disposable” or unworthy games, but I see no issue with a game that gives me a quality experience for only an hour for 0.99c. It’s not disposable, it’s short. But I digress. The point of that was meant to be that Forget Me Not has withstood the test of time on my iPhone, being played consistently for the many months since I first stumbled across it.

Forget Me Not is best described as a roguelike pacman shooter, which only sounds odd until you play it. You control this little square creature through what I think are procedurally generated mazes (at the least, there is a lot of them) collecting flowers and shooting enemies. Movement and shooting are both automatic, leaving the player to only have to worry about steering. Enemies are greatly varied and often end up fighting each other, too, while explosions can destry who segments of the world itself.
It is a deceptively deep and intrinsic game with systems, abilities, and scoring perhaps best discovered than described. In your first few games you will probably end up shooting yourself in the back or being telefragged by appearing enemies until you finally begin to understand how it all fits together. It’s a game easily learned but rarely mastered. I still regularly topple my own high score as I continue to improve at the game despite the many hours already spent with it.

Most interesting, though, is Forget Me Not’s noises. It has no music, per se, but a cacophony of unique, droning noises creates an ever-changing and organic backing tape to each level.

Sadly, I didn’t write anything about Forget Me Not this year, but James Dilks offers a pretty decent review of it at Kill Screen. Gems like Forget Me Not are precisely why I love iOS gaming. I want you to play this game.

6. Gears of War 3 (Epic)

Gears of War 3 was one of those games that was exactly what I hoped it would be—nothing more, nothing less, just exactly what I wanted and expected. More specifically, “what I hoped for” from the third Gears of War was the focus and intensity of Gears of War 2’s Horde mode without the floaty, gimicky bits of Gears of War 2’s campaign. Gears 2’s campaign was lost in rail segments, flying segments, and a terrible worm segment completely lacking in any kind of enemy worth shooting.

Gears of War’s strength is in taking cover, being pinned down by a swarm of enemies, and slowly-but-surely progressing against them, fighting for every inch of land as you scamper from cover to cover. Every time Gears 2 found this focus, it lost it again, almost as though Epic were afraid players would get bored without some gimmick. Kind of like Mario players get bored of jumping (i.e. they don’t).

So Gears of War 3’s campaign fixed this up dramatically, as I hoped it would. Nearly the entire campaign is the fundamental take-cover-and-shoot-things play with just a few novelty segments mixing it up without completely destroying the pacing. Ultimately, Gears 3 finds the rhythm that Gears 2 completely lacked.

That said, it does have some generic boss battles (and a terribly boring and frustrating final boss), and while I found the story and thematic content compelling enough, I seem to be in the minority on that one.

Horde Mode 2.0 is also an interesting upgrade. I was initially wary of its pseudo tower defence features, but I grew to love them with the many, many hours I’ve spent in both private and public matches. Once I catch up with all the other releases of late 2011 I’m yet to get to, Horde 2.0 is what I’m most excited about returning to.

I wrote a sprawling review of Gears of War 3 for Pixel Hunt with more thoughts that wouldn’t fit inside a blog post. Ryan Kuo wrote an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal blog about what Gears of War 3 ‘really’ means, and Maddy Myers successfully takes on the unenviable task in analysing Gears of War 3’s inclusion of female characters (finally).

5. Minecraft (Mojang)

Minecraft is going to miss out on a lot of GOTY lists this year as many will argue that it was already out last year. Meanwhile, it missed out on a lot of GOTY lists last year because many argued it wasn’t technically out yet. For me, I have no qualms putting it on a GOTY list for each year. The updates to Minecraft in 2011—up to and including the eventual 1.0 release—have revolutionised the game we were all playing last year. Each new and refined feature such as the hunger bar, tuned biome algorithms, endermen, underwater caverns, powered rails, etc. have highlighted and focused Mojang’s game. It has remained resolutely Minecraft throughout its development, even as it changes what Minecraft is.

I still spend more time playing Minecraft than any other game (except perhaps Skyrim) and the vast majority of that time I am just exploring. Though, this year my girlfriend and I started our own private server, and I have finally begun to appreciate the pleasures of building. We have our home, a farm, another home, and just recently built an extensive railway between the two.

Minecraft is one of the most important games of the current day, and one of the greatest games of all times. The day I stop having unique experiences in Minecraft is the day I stop playing, and I can not foresee that day ever arising.

I wrote a lot about Minecraft this year. In Hyper 220 I wrote a feature about the phenomenon of the Minecraft community making “suggestions” as to what Notch and Mojang should add to Minecraft. In the same issue I wrote a review of Minecraft, and it is the first perfect score I have ever given out. I also wrote about the Beta 1.8 update for Games On Net (easily the most significant of all the Minecraft updates) and Towards Dawn, my nomadic adventure, is still going after taking a many-month hiatus through the middle of this year. I’m not sure of much else written about Minecraft this year, but Kris Ligman does have an essay at Dire Critic called “The Map and the Territory” that is both interesting and somewhat related to Minecraft.

And so ends Part Four. Tomorrow we wrap things up with my top four games of 2011.

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part Three

2012-01-03T17:40:00.000-08:00

So continues the countdown of my personal favourite twenty games of 2011. This is the third post in the series, leading on from parts One and Two.

12. Bulletstorm (Epic & People Can Fly)

I never intended to give Bulletstorm a chance. Just another manshooter among many other manshooters in an industry that really doesn’t need any more manshooters. But then I somehow stumpled into a Twitter conversation with many people insisting I should try it, and then Epic sent me a copy, and now I regret ever dismissing it.

Bulletstorm is, indeed, a ridiculous and utterly absurd manshooter, but it knows that is is ridiculous and utterly absurd manshooter. I think Adrian Forest has perhaps said it best to me: “It is what Duke Nukem Forever should have been.” It consciously plays with and exaggerates conventions to create truly laugh-out-loud moments. Not just the emergent ‘lol’ of managing to do something unintended, but the fully scripted, directed laugh. I know of few games that can pull this off. The best is a pseudo-boss battle about halfway through the game. There is this pipe and, well, perhaps you have to play it for yourself.

The game looks, feels, and flows amazingly with interesting weapons, breathtaking scenery, clever design, and countless interesting ways to kill things. The ‘skill shots’ that reward you with points for killing enemies in unique ways have essentially gameificated the first-person shooter, but it works. Best is when you are experimenting with weapons and the environment and the game rewards you for it.

I do have an issue, though, with “intentionally dumb” games like Bulletstorm or Just Cause 2 or (I assume) Saints Row 3. As rollocking as they tend to be, are they just the easy way out? They’re dumb, but “we meant to do that” so that makes it okay? Wouldn’t the real challenge be to make a game that isn’t dumb in the first place? But maybe ‘dumb’ is the wrong word. Just because something is comedic does not mean it is dumb. It is something I constantly struggle with. I know I love these games, but I feel slightly bad for it.

11. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Eidos Montreal)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn’t so much a love or hate game as it is a love and hate game. The highs are so superbly high, and the lows are down in the gutter. The story and writing are top notch; the cyberpunk world is beautifully realised and thoughtfully implemented in both narrative and gameplay alike. The multiple ways each challenge can be approached from is incredibly impressive, and there is plenty of breathing room for improvisation without having to reload the moment something doesn’t go according to plan. Everyone can make their own version of Adam Jensen no less or more viable than anyone else’s.

But then their are the lows. The mindbogglingly bad boss battles would have been an irritation in any other game, but in Human Revolution they are outright offensive. It’s truly hard to believe that through the entire development process of the game not a single person noticed how terrible, unintuitive, and jarring they are. Being forced to fill a meat-sponge with bullets after being able to sneak through the past few hours without a gun drawn is just dumb. You would have thought the designers noticed this when they were forced to fill each boss arena with randomly scattered machine pistols.

Each boss is worse than the last and the story itself goes haywire to a Metal Gear Solid 4 degree in the final act, spiralling into incoherency before a disappointing “press a button to watch a contradicting and absolutist cut-scene” ending. For a game all about exploring the grey areas between the binaries—good and evil, human and machine, flesh and computer—the black and white endings are doubly pathetic.

I loved Human Revolution while I was playing it and not fighting a boss, but I felt nothing but cheated and angry by the time I finished it. ‘Angry’ because the parts that are good are so, so, so incredibly good.

10. Ico & Shadow of the Colossus HD (Team Ico)

Some of the GOTY lists I participated in this year strictly said “No HD remakes!” which I think is sad as the Ico & Shadow of the Colossus HD remaster for PS3 is nothing short of remarkable. These games strained the ageing PS2 to the limit and ran with faulty framerates and less-than-perfect resolutions. Now, in HD, both games feel like they were always meant to be played like this: breathtaking, smooth, and remarkable.

I played Shadow of the Colossus first as I never actually completed the original (I got annoyed at the final colossi and never went back). The newly visible detail in the giant world and its citizens is remarkably clear, and each colossi moves with a fluidity of purpose.

Ico, too, has not only survived the test of time but come out better on the other side. Just watching Yorda walk around and interact with her surroundings is pleasing. Certainly, it is let down ever-so-slightly with some clumsy platforming and last-gen checkpointing, but nothing that can’t be overlooked.

Most interesting to me was playing theseg ames for the first time through a critical lens. I was a teenager the last time I played Ico, and not much older when I played Shadow of the Colossus. Much of the nuance of the stories and the environments and the mechanics went over my head then but this time I was finely aware of every element of each game working in unison to affect me in a certain way.

One scene of Ico in particular is crafted so masterfully as to be hardly noticeable, and I wrote about it for Paste magazine. Further, Jorge Albor and Scott Juster over at Experience Points talk about the HD games in an insightful two-part podcast series that is well worth a listen to.

9. Portal 2 (Valve)

Portal, along with Bioshock, is one of those games you can’t imagine needing a sequel until it comes out and you play it, and then you can’t imagine that sequel not existing.

Portal 2 is Valve at their storytelling and worldbuilding finest. Not because they top Portal, but because they, somehow, manage to follow up Portal in an appropriate fashion. Whereas Portal’s surprise was that it was actually telling a story in the first place, Portal 2’s story is there from the beginning. It has to be. Its players already know the twist from the first game, and they are looking out to be fooled again. So Portal 2’s main achievement, then, is to successfully weave a story throughout the entire game that can justify a long sequence of disconnected puzzles to solve. It pulls it off flawlessly as the player works their way through Aperture Science’s long history of testing.

The writing is excellent, as is the pacing with only a few puzzles verging on the tedious. The fleshing out of Aperture Science “behind the scenes” of the test chambers as both part of the world and the story is remarkably well done without ever detracting from the puzzle solving for too long. Meanwhile, the new additions to the puzzles, such as the paints, only add to the portal gun’s centrality, rather from detracting from it. Everything still comes down to that simple pleasure of twisting space with portals.

Still, despite its masterfully told story and realised world, Portal 2 does lack a certain free-form playfulness that the first one had. There are few surfaces now that a portal can be placed on, making it much harder to perform crazy acrobatic tricks except explicitly where the game wants you to. It is sometimes less about thinking with portals and more about trying to find the one place a portal will go. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it highlights a different, more narrative-centric goal of the sequel.

A lot of people wrote a lot of things about Portal 2, but being in the middle of a thesis when it came out I read very little of it. Still, Kirk Hamilton’s review at Paste is a certain standout, as is G. Christopher William’s article at Popmatters reading Portal 2 through the lens of gender and power relations.

And so ends Part Three.

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part Two

2012-01-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

So continues my countdown of my personal top twenty games of 2011. This is the second post in the series, leading on from Part One.

16. Dark Souls (From Software)

Objectively, Dark Souls is a great game. Subjectively, Dark Souls is not at all my kind of game. The latter is why it is so far down my list; the former is why it is on my list at all.

Dark Souls is an incredibly difficult action RPG. Well, then again, ‘difficult’ is perhaps the wrong word. Perhaps ‘demanding’ is more accurate. Dark Souls demands you figure things out for yourself and will punish you every time you don’t, every time you decide you can do something solely because you are the player and you want to. It’s like the school master with a cane whipping kids who don’t learn their times tables. It teaches its lessons by punishing you and making you do it again.

More important than training your character in Dark Souls is training yourself. You must figure out when to parry, when to counter, when to wait, when to pounce. There is a fluid link between controller and character that leaves you feeling in control of your character’s movements like few other games do. Consequentially, when you fail you only have yourself to blame, and when you succeed, the glory and the praise is all your own. You fight and bleed for each pixel gained in Dark Souls and the smallest progressing feels like the ultimate accomplishment. When I completed the game’s very first boss, less than an hour into the game, I gleefully and earnestly tweeted my feat in full caps, I was so excited.
Level design, too, deserves to be applauded. What originally seems like a linear experience opens up and links back together as you progress and open the world up. The way a drawbridge opens or a ladder extends or a door unlocks to place you two steps from somewhere that was previously two hours away shows incredible foresight in design.

What is perhaps most interesting about Dark Souls is that it proves that not every game has to be for everyone in order to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, however, the flipside of this is many people making the absurd claim that Dark Souls proves that “hardcore” games are better and “they just don’t make them like they used to.” I hate this way of thinking, the idea that most of today’s games are bad solely because they can be played by more people. But still, I am glad that games like Dark Souls are still able to exist.

Perhaps the most nuanced and articulated discussion of Dark Soul's unique difficulty that successfully goes beyond a simplistic "hard equals good" came out just today in Chris Dahlen's detailed analysis of Sen's Fortress, a part of the world I never got to. I wrote an article for Gameranx about how Dark Souls’s audiovisual and thematic design justify its mechanical design of essentially grinding. I was really happy with how this article turned out. Still, not long after I wrote it, after about twenty hours of playing, I decided it was time to give up—Dark Souls had beaten me. But just last week I read Simon Parkin’s absolutely excellent retrospective on the game at Eurogamer, and now I can feel myself being tempted back to it…

15. Whale Trail (ustwo)

Yet another Canabaltesque for iOS. I was ready to dismiss Whale Trail as an inverted Tiny Wings try-hard. The cuteness seemed forced and superficial and it undoubtedly lacks the focus and soul of Tiny Wings. But beneath the dumb cuteness is a very tight mechanical experience. After spending a bit of time with it, I came to love Whale Trail as its own unique Canabaltesque game with its own challenges and innovations.

It is not about getting as gar as possible so much as it is about keeping as closely to the path laid out for you as possible. Collecting bubbles give your whale flying fuel (or something) and, more importantly, increase your score’s multiplier, while hitting clouds decreases it. So you want to fly the whale as closely to this path as possible. The opposite of Tiny Wings, not touching the screen will send the whale downwards, while touching will have him fly upwards, and holding for a longer period will have him do a loop-de-loop.

Controls are tight and you have a surprisingly high level of control over the whale’s route. Though, the game does have one major set back in its flawed scoring system. Your multiplier goes up as you collect bubbles and down as you hit clouds, but as bubbles become more sparse and scattered as the game progresses, the possibility of regaining your multiplier after hitting a cloud becomes less and less likely. If you haven’t hit your high score before you hit your first cloud, you might as well quit there and then. A sad oversight in an otherwise great little game.

14. Atom Zombie Smasher (Blendo Games)

There are not too many single-player videogames that you can ‘lose’. You can die in plenty of them, to be sure, but you can’t straight out lose in too many of them. This more than anything else is what makes Atom Zombie Smasher stand out: you can—and probably will—lose many times before you eventually win. But this isn’t a little game like Binding of Isaac where losing a game means you have lost a five or ten minute game. A game of Atom Zombie Smasher could take an hour or more before you finally accept you are going to lose.

This is how Atom Zombie Smasher manages to be one of the most horrifying, desperate, and depressing zombie games I have ever played. This despite the great level of abstraction in the games visuals, with humans represented as yellow dots and zombies as pink dots. The goal is to rescue as many humans as possible from a city slowly but surely being overrun and infested. Those you leave behind will be infected and contribute to the zombie AI team’s score.

Odds become increasingly depressing as the zombies take over more and more territories in greater and greater numbers. Often, you find yourself playing a zero-sum game, willingly destroying many innocent lives just to keep back the zombie tide for another day.

There’s something horrifying about the birds-eye view, too. About that final group of yellow dots swarming around what will surely be the last helicopter out of there as the purple hordes close in. You can imagine the violence and chaos as the last fifty humans try to fit on a helicopter that can only carry twenty. It just goes to show that you don’t need blood and gore for a good zombie tale—your imagine can do just fine by itself.

13. Terraria (Re-Logic)

“2D Minecraft” is an unfair oversimplification of what Terraria is, but it sure is a good way to sell copies. Certainly, Minecraft is Terraria’s obvious main influence, but Terraria takes the base fundamentals in a totally different direction. Where Minecraft is about using a few base instruments and simple resources for whatever you wish, Terraria is about using a vast variety of resources to craft a vast variety of instruments to then find different resources to then craft different instruments. Grappling hooks, health upgrades, harpoons, flying boots, laser guns, etc. Etc. Where Minecraft is less about any kind of progressing and more about existing, Terraria is far more about progressing. The special weapons and areas and occasional boss battles craft a slightly more directed experience than that found in Minecraft.

It’s an interesting formula that says as much about what Minecraft is as what it isn’t, and it led to to crown Terraria as an anti-Minecraft in my review for Kill Screen. Terraria is the first of the inevitably many games that will follow in Minecraft’s wake. It is not a clone, but a contributor to an exciting new genre.

And that's Part Two done. Tomorrow we enter the top ten. Exciting!

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part One

2012-01-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

It’s been a huge year for games with many AAA, indie, and mobile games competing for my time. It’s also been a huge year for me, too. I wrote a thesis, and I started freelance writing in a regular-enough capacity that I don’t feel weird when I tell people I’m a freelance writer (that’s a pretty big deal). All in all, 2011 has been pretty alright.

At the end of 2010, in lieu of any kind of “best of 2010” list, I wrote a series of posts with some rough thoughts on the games that made my year. This year, I thought I’d go a step further and do a somewhat ranked list of my top 20 games (in five parts of four games each) along with some rough thoughts on each of them. I stress that this isn’t an exhaustive “best games” of the year but rather just my personal favourites out of those I have played. Hopefully I can give some interesting insight into what I loved (and what I didn’t) about each of these games.

I’ll also link to articles related to each game that I wrote and/or read during the year. However, I’ve been a dreadful reader this year and have surely missed many great posts about each of these games. So please leave comments with links to any relevant articles and I’ll add them in.

But before I start, it's been a such a huge year for videogames that there are plenty of games that haven't quite made it into my list. So, tied at number 21 are: Jamestown, Space Marine, Game Dev Story, Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP, From Dust, Drop 7, and LittleBigPlanet 2. And now, onto the top twenty!

20. Uncharted 3 (Naughty Dog)

Uncharted 3 is one of the few games on this list that are both among my top games of 2011 and my biggest disappointments. Individual scenes and stages are phenomenally directed and paced and easily surpass Uncharted 2’s many already awesome scenes. Escaping the burning mansion and sinking cruise ship in particular were high points. Everything is bigger and better and exploding twice as often.

But the overarching story is lacklustre and deflated. It starts somewhere mildly interesting and then goes nowhere with it. Many threads are left unconcluded, and the few conclusions it does have fizzle rather than explode. Half the game—especially the whole pirate segment—just feels like a tacked on “Deleted Scenes” DLC with no connection whatsoever to the plot. The game ended and the first thing I thought was “That was it?”

Yet, the superb acting and animation is still there. The superb action and set pieces, too, but it’s all just floating with nothing to hold it together. With a tighter narrative threaded through its individual segments, Uncharted 3 could be much higher on this list.

19. The Binding of Isaac (Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl)

I won’t lie: if The Binding of Isaac had not been developed by half of the Super Meat Boy team, I probably would have paid no attention to it. But McMillen’s involvement in the project along with the idea of a “twin-stick shooter rogue-like” got me hooked. The setup of the game is equal parts disgusting, grim, and absurd: inspired by a very loose reading of the bible story of the same name, Isaac has been imprisoned in a hellish basement by his crazed, voice-hearing mother. He must fight waves of enemies by shooting them with his tears as he descends the floors for his final confrontation with Mother.

Despite being more accessible than your typical rogue-like, Binding of Isaac can still be unforgivingly hard and how far you get in your single life will often be determined as much by pot luck as by player skill. As you proceed through the procedurally generated floors, you’ll find randomly placed powerups (and powerdowns). Some will powerup your tears, some will make them boomerangs, some will make them bloody, and others will make them seek out targets. You will die and fail many times before you finally make it through all the floors to the boss battle with mother, and you will probably die there several times before you finally beat her. That so much of it comes down to luck is what I found so strangely compelling about The Binding of Isaac. Maybe next time I’d find more heart containers and useful powerups. Maybe.

The game does have some weird issues, though, such as terrible slowdown when more than a few enemies are on screen at once (unless this has been patched in the past few months), and I would much prefer to be playing it on a console with a controller and a couch than having to wrangle with my keyboard, but both of these can be overlooked for what is probably the best game I played this year that cost less than five dollars and wasn’t on my phone.

Drew Dixon’s review of the game at Paste is perhaps one of my favourite reviews of the game as Drew struggles to come to terms with his own enjoyment of the game alongside his own Christian faith.

18. Tiny Tower (Nimblebit)

For the second quarter of this year, I was obsessed with Tiny Tower. I would check it while walking to the bus, while sitting at my computer, while waiting on the loading screens of other games, while talking to people, while eating dinner. I was fully aware that it had been designed in a way to be addictive, to try to get people to spend money on the micro-transactions that essentially meant you could progress without playing. But Tiny Tower had one flaw: I actually enjoyed playing it. The simplistic, meaningless, never-ending micromanagement was an almost meditative activity. In the months I played it, I never once considered spending money to speed up the process. I was enjoying it too much.

There is little to do in the game other than stocking shelves and running the elevator. Still, the adorable little bitizens, the simple UI, and the perpetually running game clock (always there in your pocket, always ticking away) made it impossible for me to stay away. I got to about floor 85 of my tower before I stopped, and even now I often consider going back. The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that if I started again I wouldn’t stop for months.

Many hated Tiny Tower. Some (justifiably) claimed it was as unethical as any other free-to-play micro-transaction game in the Farmville mould, that it was an evil thing crafted in a way solely to remove the money of those too impatient to actually play. Others (unjustifiably) argued that it isn’t even a game at all because there is no challenge and no goal, and this is just rubbish (Secondpersonshooter has a good guide to the “X is not a game!” claim and its stupidity). Tiny Tower is excellently and expertly crafted, both in terms of game design and consumer object.

I wrote a review of Tiny Tower for Paste, highlighting its ambiguous ethics and my love of it regardless. Jorge Albor focused more on the ethics (or lack thereof) of the game in his excellent post at Popmatters. Michael Abbott, meanwhile, has a clever piece at Brainy Gamer which I feel many of commenters have misread (or I have misread!). They seem to think he is legitimately complaining about the game, whereas I read his piece as a satire of those heaping the hate. Either way, it is a good read.

But my absolute favourite piece of Tiny Tower related writing this year was J.P. Grant’s article at Infinite Lag where he analyses Tiny Tower through Fredrick W Taylor’s “Theory of Scientific Management”. It’s a really great read and I strongly recommend it regardless of your feelings towards the game.

17. Tiny Wings (Andreas Illiger)

Another iOS game, Tiny Wings was one of the many great single-button, get-as-far-as-you-can games to come out this year on the iPhone. I’m not sure if we are still calling this genre “Canabaltesque” (as a nod to Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt) but I’m going to be calling it that for now. Anyway, Tiny Wings, own unique spin on the Canabaltesque formula is a bird whose wings are too tiny to fly. Instead, he slides down hills in order to launch himself temporarily into the air by doing massive jumps. A touch of the screen tucks his wings in and sends him plummeting towards the ground, while not touching has him flap his wings frantically as he tries to get airborne. The trick is to line up his descents with the hills to get the maximum slide and leap off the next one.

The audiovisual design is charming and uplifting, and the entire game has a really positive atmosphere. It isn’t about a bird who can’t fly; it’s about a bird who is going to fly whether his wings are good enough or not, damn it.

Sadly, though, the difficulty spikes terribly around the sixth island (even after a patch), which makes it very east to give up playing. Still, Tiny Wings can very much be seen as the forerunner to the many other interesting and high quality Canabaltesque games that graced the iPhone this year.

I wrote this little pseudo-review of the game, with a focus on the game's positive attitude, from my GDC hotel room after having spent much of my flight from Brisbane to San Francisco playing the game. Also, my favourite piece of videogame-related art is a Tiny Wings piece. Check out Daniel Purvis's illustration for Hyper #212.

And that's it for Part One. Continue on to Part Two!

2011: The Best Of

2011-12-31T19:45:00.000-08:00

I'm not normally one for writing reflective "The Year That Was" posts but, well, 2011 deserves one. It was a pretty giant year for me. I somehow managed to scrounge up a press pass and get across the world to the Game Developer's Conference at the start of the year; I wrote a thesis; I played more great games than I can fit in an upcoming "Top 20 Games of 2011" blog series (stay tuned!); and, perhaps most importantly, I somehow stumbled over that blurry line between "random videogame blogger" and "freelance videogame journalist/critic/what-have-you".

I've been fortunate through 2011 to have the chance this year to write a vast variety of articles for a vast variety of outlets, including such prestigious outlets as Edge and Ars Technica that I never could have imagined I would one day write for.

So I thought I would write this quick post to recap on some of my favourite pieces of writing from the past year. In other words, those few articles I wrote that I can actually stand reading myself.

"I Think They're Mad: Inside A 48 Hour Battle To Build The Best Videogame" (Ars Technica): Easily my most successful piece of writing this year (well, ever) and easily the one I most expected to fail miserably. When Truna asked me to cover this year's Fab 48 Hour Game Competition, I'm not sure why I instantly assumed that meant "record the entire 48 hours in one epic article". It wasn't until I was on my way to QUT's Kelvin Grove Campus with computer, sleeping bag, and spare clothes that I realised she has probably just meant for me to visit for an hour and write up a quick story.

Going into it, I had no idea what I was going to write or how it was going to turn out. I had sent Ben Kuchera at Ars a rambling pseudo-pitch of an email saying I would try to write a kind of liveblog equivalent of an article. A kind of subjective "as it happens" thing. I don't think I've ever written a pitch with so many instances of "kind of like" in it. Still, he asked to see a first draft once I had it written up and actually knew what the hell it was I actually wrote.

So I wrote it. I walked around and spoke to people while scribbling in a notebook, then rushed back to my laptop and tried to write out a rough draft narrative of everything I had witnessed, and then I picked up my notebook and went out again. And again. And again. It was a while before I had any real focus or idea of just what I was doing or aiming for, but things started to fall into place once I made the decision to just focus on a select few teams rather than trying to cover all of them. Fortunately, one of the teams I chose won overall--I have no idea how I would have concluded this otherwise!

So "I Think They're Mad" was a surprise hit and, in retrospect, I think I was mad to ever attempt it. It made Ars Technica's "Favourite Gaming Stories of 2011" list and even has an ebook version available for purchase if you are so inclined. I went into it expecting to come out with a 5,000 word ramble that I would just stick on this blog and have read by nobody. Instead I came out with 25,000 words that received nearly unanimous (and entirely unexpected) praise.

"Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto" (Critical Damage): Some of my most popular writing seems to be my angriest. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe the rapid, off-the-top-of-your-head writing one tends to when they are angry closely reflects my usual writing behaviour of writing rambling draft after rambling draft. I wrote this rant after the second day of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in Melbourne in response to a panel that didn't really go very well. I wasn't the only person to write criticisms of the panel in the weeks after Freeplay, but I think I was the first (and, let's be honest, the drunkest).

The panel was meant to be about videogame journalism, and all four panel members were utterly deserving to be on the panel, and I would go to another panel with exactly the same synopsis with all four of them again in a flash. The problem was that the panel got quickly sidetracked into territory it was never meant to go into and a whole lot of problematic claims ended up being made without being challenged. So my responsive rant should not be (and hopefully was not) seen as an attack on the panel members, but as a response to the incorrect things that were said about topics the panel was never meant to cover.

I wrote my first draft of this post on the stairwell of a Melbourne backpacker's hostel at 2am, more than slightly drunk after the Freeplay after-party. I wisely listened to some friends on Twitter who told me to sleep on it before I post it, so the following morning I sat in Federation Square and read it aloud to my brother, Glynn, who wisely recommended I deleted about 50% of the expletives. I then posted it, packed up my computer, and chilled out in Melbourne for a day while waiting for my plane home to Brisbane.

It spread like wildfire and I instantly regretted posting it so soon after Freeplay's end as, on the whole, Freeplay was (and always is) an utterly positive and uplifting and inspiring event. I instantly regretted that the first big article to come out of it was my hugely negative rant. But, still, it had to be said and it had to be said while it was still fresh in everyone's minds. So, in the end, I'm glad I got it off my chest.

"Bastion Review" (Paste): I loved Bastion. I played it through twice in three days and felt absolutely compelled to write about it. I wanted to say everything about it and I wanted to say it now. Fortunately, Paste still needed a review so I had an outlet. This is one of those reviews that practically wrote itself. I found exactly the right words for everything I wanted to say and exactly the right paragraphs to fit it all in. This is perhaps the only review I've ever written that I didn't look back at afterwards and note all the things I forgot to mention.

"Modern Warfare 3 Isn't An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK)" (Kotaku Australia): Another angry rant. This piece was a response to an article by Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker where he wrote a largely negative rant about Modern Warfare 3 and how it was an "un-game". I read it, and it made me kind of furious. It seemed to me like he had begrudgingly gone into the game with the intent to not enjoy it and to make it break. He seemed to want to play it in a way that Modern Warfare 3 was never meant to be played so he could blame the game when it didn't work. So I was ranting about this on Twitter when Mark Serrels, Kotaku Australia's Editor, DM'ed me and asked if I would be interested in writing a response piece. I said maybe, as I had quite a few other articles to work on. But, by the end of the day, I was emailing Mark my responding rant. Truly, it is easier to write when you are angry.

Some context I think this piece deserves: I was responding to John's article as it appeared on Kotaku. I had missed the point that it was a republished article from Rock Paper Shotgun where it had a different title and was, essentially, just John's review of the game. I felt a bit like a jerk when I realised this, that I had written this response to someone's subjective review of the game. But still, this absolute dismissal of games that aren't about the player being in a position of power by videogame criticism is a huge bugbear of mine so I am glad I wrote a response.

John then wrote a response to my response on Rock Paper Shotgun, which really just reiterated many of his opening points. Still, I think all three posts make for a really interesting dialogue. It is an argument, to be sure, but it remains a very civil one, and I think we can agree to disagree. Also, while I didn't respond to John's second post, Jim Sterling did at Destructoid, and he says pretty much what I would have said if I did respond.

"Character Building" (Kill Screen: The Intimacy Issue): So I can't link you to this article as it is in print. If you want to read it you will have to go buy Kill Screen's The Intimacy Issue, which is really a thing you should do anyway. And, really, if this wasn't in print I probably never would have written it. The idea of putting such a personal article on the internet where an "in real life" friend of family member might easily stumble across it would have absolutely terrified me--as it has terrified me enough to never even mention this article on the internet before now. The internet might be great for anonymity, but it can't beat print for discretion.

"Character Building" is about the darkest years of my ongoing struggle with anorexia through the lens of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That perhaps sounds like a strange connection, but it was a realisation of what I was doing to CJ's body in the game that first forced me to accept what I was doing to my own body.

I am neither as proud nor as terrified of any other piece of my writing. I am so glad that I worked up the courage to write it, and that I had the editorial support in Chris Dahlen to turn it into something so much more than just another confessional. But I am also terrified that it exists out there for people to stumble across, read, and know about me. I guess acknowledging its existence on the internet, finally, is a part of getting over that terror.

Anorexia was something I had wanted to write about for quite some time (what writer isn't consistently tempted to write about their darkest secrets?), but I never had the place or the context to do it in. Who would have thought that a videogame magazine would have given me the chance to finally get it out?

And perhaps that, more than anything, is what I have gotten out of 2011. Not an excuse to play more videogames, as the joke so often goes when you tell people you write about videogames, but a chance to just write and write with a purpose.

There is an old Brainy Gamer podcast (I'm not exactly sure which one) where Michael Abbott is interviewing Chris Dahlen and Jamin Warren about Kill Screen, and one of them says (and I paraphrase) that if you are serious about writing about videogames you need to approach it primarily as a writer, not as a gamer. It sounds so obvious, but it was not something I'd ever thought so explicitly before. Later that day, I wrote my first pitch to Kill Screen and took some of the earliest steps towards seriously trying to write about videogames.

I am doing this not because I love videogames (which I do) but because I love writing. So if you read anything I wrote (including this) in 2011, thank you for giving me a reason to write.

Linear Writings

2011-12-06T23:27:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of new articles around the place you may be interested in. Firstly, over at Games on Net, I have devoted my latest "You Know What I Love?" column to the Modern Warfare series. It's... a complicated kind of love. This is as close as I will get to a response to John Walker's response to my response to his review. Also, did you see Jim Sterling threw a hat into that particular ring, too? He says a lot of things I agree with.

Secondly, I wrote a piece for Paste about a very memorable choice in Ico that, really, wasn't a choice at all but that doesn't matter.

I'm pretty happy with how both of these turned out, and they have a lot more in common than I realised they did when I first started thinking about them both. In each I am essentially arguing for that same old thing I'm always arguing: for videogame criticism to stop putting so much onus on the player and instead look at the interrelationships of acting and being acted upon present in all games.

So hopefully I've said something interesting about that.

An Audiosurf Playlist

2011-12-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

I've already linked my Audiosurf article over at Gameranx. Now, following suit from some of my fellow Audiosurfers on Twitter, here are the mp3s of the songs, if you wish to play them.

I've also added a Side B. While the original songs I chose were mainly focused on presenting the broad scope of what is possible in Audiosurf, Side B should be more seen as "songs I personally love to surf."

So I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think.

Also, before you do this, you should really grab and surf Mattie Brice's playlist because it is an absolutely amazing surf.

Brendan's Audiosurf Playlist Extravaganza:

Side A
1. Killing All The Flies - Mogwai
2. It's Not Meant To Be - Tame Impala
3. Right Here Right Now - Fatboy Slim
4. Skinny Love - Bon Iver
5. Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens
6. Bad Romance - Lady GaGa
7. Blue Monday - New Order
8. Hearts A Mess - Gotye
9. Teardrop - Massive Attack
10. Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love - Underworld

Side B
11. Changes - Supercar
12.The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
13.Dayvan Cowboy - Boards of Canada
14. Crystal - New Order
15. Squares - The Beta Band
16. Release Yo Dell (Prodigy Mix) - Method Man
17. Clubbed To Death - Rob Dougan
18. Wolf Like Me - TV on the Radio
19. Music is My Radar - Blur

Moments

2011-12-02T20:40:00.000-08:00

The State Library of Queensland has a place called The Edge, which is like a (for lack of a better word) mutlimedia wing of the library. It's pretty cool! People can go there to use the computers and other digital equipment and they host all sorts of funky events. For the last month or so they have been running a program specifically focused on games, and as part of this, people have been invited to write guest blogs for their website. People including me!

I decided at first that I wanted to write something about 'moments'. I have this idea that has nagged me for a long time that videogames are about moments. That it isn't about the overarching story or goals or even the mechanics of a game that really hold our attention and that keep us coming back to new games over and over again. Rather, I think it is the hope that we will create moments. These crazy, half-authored/half-chance coming-togethers of player and machine. Essentially, we play videogames in case something cool happens.

So I thought about how I would write something about this and in the end decided that, rather, I would just describe two memorable videogame moments (for me, at least). Two moments that, for very different reasons, epitomise why I love playing videogames: for those moments that everything just works to get an emotional reaction out of me.

So the first blog I wrote was about Portal and the second blog was about Modern Warfare 2. I intentionally chose fairly well-known games since I don't think I am writing for a particularly game-savvy audience. Still, hopefully you get something out of them. I'd be interested to see what people think of them!

Also, for the three or four of you that have been reading my blog for some time, you might notice these blogs are similar to a series of blogs I was writing a while back by the same name. So there you go.

And in unrelated news, I have teamed up with George Kokoris from Microsoft Game Studios and Shane Liesegang from Bethesda Studios and together we are writing a letter series as we simultaneously play through the classic shooter Marathon. We've each written an introductory post and next week will begin playing the first few levels. Please follow along with us. Maybe even play along!

THESIS: "Partners in Crime: The Relationship Between the Playable Character and the Videogame Player"

2011-11-29T16:28:00.000-08:00

If you have been following me on any kind of social media network this year, you've probably heard me mention once or twice that I've been writing an Honours* thesis in Communication and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland. Well, I submitted it about a month ago and today the marks finally got released. It would seem I got a First, which essentially means I received some mark above 80%. So this is great!

And now that marks are finalised, I can finally let you fine people read it, if you wish. If you want it, and if I have done this correctly, you should be able to get it from this link.

If in all my social media network rantings I never actually mentioned what I was doing, here is my abstract:

This thesis creates a space for videogame criticism to account for the playable character’s role in the shaping of the player’s experience. Just as the player defines certain actions and characteristics of the playable character, so too do the character’s actions and characteristics shape the player’s experience. The two exist in an intimate coupling where intention and action start with neither actor but in the flow of information and agency between them.

To account for how meaning is produced in videogame play the videogame critic must account not only for the player’s agency and actions but also for how the player is acted upon. Players interact with videogames textually as fictional worlds embedded with actual imperatives that afford and constraint different styles of play. While most videogame scholars acknowledge the role of the playable character as a vehicle through which the player navigates and configures this world, rarely is its mediating effect on the player fully recognised. In discourses surrounding videogame play it is not unlikely for the terms “player” and “character” to be used interchangeably when discussing the agent that acts within the videogame’s fictional world. This uncertainty as to just who is acting highlights a gap in the existing literature on playable characters and their significance towards the production of textual meaning.

Engaging with actor-network theory and cyborg theory to understand videogame play as cybernetic, this thesis demonstrates how the playable character’s nonhuman agency—independent of the player’s intentions—can be accounted for. It explores how the agencies of both player and playable character intertwine and mediate each other to form a hybrid actor, the player-character, which is the actual actor that navigates both the actual and fictional worlds encompassed in videogame play. Finally, through a textual analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV, this thesis demonstrates how the player-character hybrid can be deployed to account for the playable character’s role in the production of the videogame text’s meaning.

So there you go. If this sounds relevant to your interests, please give it a read and let me know what you think.

(*For those of you in countries where university doesn't have an Honours year, it is this kind of bridging, research year you do right at the end of your undergraduate degree, usually (though not always) if you want to go onto postgraduate work. So this isn't quite on the level of a Masters or PhD dissertation, so don't expect such a thing!)

Skyrim Review and Some Further Thoughts

2011-11-29T15:55:00.000-08:00

Some games, the review just comes out. Sometimes to the extent that I must stop playing the game simply to write the review as it won't wait any longer. Sometimes you just get this perfect mix of experience and critical thoughts that make writing a review the easiest thing ever.

Skyrim was no such game.

My review is up now for Pixel Hunt. I'm really happy with everything I said, but there is so much more I didn't say. I probably could have kept writing for another three thousand words or so if I wanted to and had the energy to. But writing a review of a game that a) so many people have already played, and b) where everyone is going to have such a unique experience, is pretty dang hard, it seems.

I focus on two main things: how utterly awesome the world is, and how utterly horrid the UI is. You might think the amount of words I devote to the UI is unfair but it really is bad and it really, really bugs me in a way it wouldn't in a lesser game. It in no way makes the game any less worth playing, but it certainly hurts the experience regardless.

Two things I didn't mention in my review that I would've liked were combat and music. For combat, I wanted to say something along the lines of "If you are playing an Elder Scrolls game for the combat, you are doing it wrong." But I think I have told enough people they are wrong for one week! The combat is good enough for your character to engage with. Sure, throw a few companions and enemies in the mix and it can begin to look like an Under-6s soccer match, but for the most part, it works good enough. You don't have the control of Dark Souls, sure, but that isn't the point of the game. Really, I would've been happy if they had removed the different kind of attacks all together and just had one attack for each weapon, a la Morrowind with the "use best attack" option on.

The weird slow-mo executions are... weird and, for the most part, jarring. The problem with these is that you can't really have a set of executions for all characters when every single character is going to have its own imagined morals and personality. I can hardly imagine Qwae decapitating people, but she needs to for the bonus damage that perk gives her. Sometimes it works. Sneaking up behind someone and slitting their throat is enormously fulfilling, but picking up a cave bear on two daggers just feels like some weird, VATS-induced hallucination.

The music is something I realised I forgot to mention the moment my review went live. My thoughts on it have been sitting on a piece of paper beside my computer for weeks! Argh! Anyway, these are my thoughts on the music that should have been in the review: I remember reading a review of Morrowind years ago that lauded the game but hated the boring, looping soundtrack. The review recommended that you rip your Lord of the Rings soundtrack to your xbox, and play it instead of Morrowind's soundtrack. I can't help but think Skyrim's developers read that review and did exactly that. The way the music shifts from ambient skipping-through-the-woods to harrowing choir there-is-a-dragon-right-above-you is amazing. It is so subtle then so present, and the way it interacts with the dragon language and your shouts is really quite phenomenal.

And finally, some further thoughts I have for something I want to write in the coming weeks. I've been thinking about Skyrim and coming of age. At the start of the game, when you create your character and start thinking about what skills you will focus in, you aren't really choosing who your character will be, but who they will become. For hours, you are limited by whatever armour/weapons/magic you can scrounge. You want to be sneaky, perhaps, but you suck at sneaking. So you keep sneaking-and-failing then fight until you sneak-and-fail a little less. And a little less. Soon enough, you are walking up to a Bandit Chief and stabbing him in the back with a dagger before he even realises his entire posse is dead. So it's this weird thing where for the first part of the game you don't really get to be the character you want, but eventually you get to become them.

And that is something I plan to write more on. In the meantime, perhaps you want to go read my review.

You're Playing It Wrong!

2011-11-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

I have an editorial up at Kotaku Australia which is a response to an editorial that Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker wrote on Wednesday. In this editorial I might say one or two crazy things like "Modern Warfare 3 is my favourite game of 2011" and "You are playing it wrong!". So nothing too crazy.

I won't waste your time repeating what I say there here, but I felt I needed to write this as I am tired of a game's worth being measured in "freedom". I think there are plenty of valid criticisms to be leveled at Modern Warfare 3, but not being able to be a leader or to choose where you go isn't one of them. Talk about it's (arguable) glorifying of war or the complete lack of female characters or the implausibility of its plot if you wish. You can even talk about how it is or isn't well paced and how the set-pieces are or aren't well directed, but judging it simply for being a linear game is wrong, I feel.

And certainly, Walker's piece did make some of these valid criticisms, and that is cool! My disagreement should be seen as specifically towards those bits of his article that discuss the game is terms of choice or lack thereof. Such as his title.

Related, here is an old blog post I wrote last year when I played the first Modern Warfare and was utterly surprised at how much I enjoyed it despite my complete lack of agency.

UPDATE: Walker has now written a response to my response to his post on Rock Paper Shotgun. While moving away from a form of game criticism obsessed with player freedom and privilege is central to my interests and studies, I'm kind of over forwarding this very narrow debate centered on a single game. So instead of repeating my arguments in response to Walker's repetition of his own and continuing this ad infinitum, I'll just leave this as my closing remark and walk away:

If someone is reading a book you despise or watching a film you hate, you might tell them that it is a horrible book/film, but you wouldn't tell them that it isn't a book/film. Yet we seem to do this all the time with games. I hate this. If any videogame regardless of its quality does not fit within your definition of what a videogame is, the problem is with your definition, not the game.

New Writing: Audiosurf, Lost Hearts, and Qwae.

2011-11-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

[source]

A few things that I've written have appeared around the internet this week. I would like to give each piece its own kind of afterthoughts piece here but, sadly, I don't really have the time for that so here is some quick thoughts on each of them before I go back to ~~Skyrim~~ writing all the other articles I have due:

"You Know What I Love? Qwae" at Games On Net: My second column looking at why I love a thing that I love is looking at Qwae, my personalised character that exists across videogames and universes. While I was writing this I thought I was describing this weird thing that only I do. It turns out I could not have been more wrong. In the comments, everyone is telling the story of their own personalised character they have been playing with for years. It's really quite fascinating.

"The Immersive Wonder of Audiosurf" at Gameranx: This article is, essentially, a mixtape for you to play in Audiosurf. I love Audiosurf and I want you to love Audiosurf, and these are some of the best songs and can think of to achieve this. Of course, as soon as I wrote this I thought of another 20-odd songs that are even better. This was a post I'd been chewing over for some time so it's nice to finally give it a home.

"Where Is My Heart? review at Edge: Technically this one is in the magazine, but you can read most of it online, at least. Where Is My Heart? is an amazing little indie game on PSN that I've been wanting to play since I got to try it out at the Kill Screen party at GDC earlier this year. Was great to finally be able to just sit down for an afternoon and play it. It was one of those games that I needed to write a review about afterwards just because I had so much I wanted to say about it.

Dark Souls: A Time To Grind

2011-11-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

I wrote an article for Gameranx about temporality in Dark Souls and how it justifies the centrality of grinding within the game's play. Some disagree with my rather broad definition of "grinding", but I am really happy with the piece, regardless. It is an idea I have been musing on for a few weeks and was planning on just throwing up here on the blog, so I am glad I was able to give it a proper home.

Time and games is fascinating. It is something my Honours supervisor kept returning to this year throughout my thesis, but which ultimately I did not have the time to look at. So many different games deal with time in so many different ways. Lots of people are saying lots of interesting things about how videogames deal with and disrupt space, and I'm looking forward to when time and temporality are given the same appreciation.

Cloud's Strife: A Rejected Pitch

2011-11-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

[When Kill Screen announced their call for submissions to their Intimacy Issue towards the end of 2010, they explicitly stated that an article about Aeris's death was probably not what they were after. That gave me an idea: a story about Aeris's death. Fortunately, they rejected this story--not least of all because Brian Taylor wrote a far superior story about the subject. Also, I had pitched another story, too, which they did accept, and which I am much happier with.

So I stumbled across the old draft of my Aeris's death piece in my "Old Writing" folder just recently. It was better than I remembered. Certainly not Kill Screen quality, but not bad for something I frantically threw together. So rather than gathering cyberdust on my computer, I might as well post it here. Enjoy.]

Cloud's Strife

The safety harness clicks open. Cloud pushes it up, leans over the side of the rollercoaster, and spews chunks onto the platform. He coughs, splutters, spits, and looks up at the scoreboard: 3200 points—enough for another prize.

He steadies himself with a trembling arm against the railing and tries to climb out of the cart without landing in his lunch. His knees buckle the moment he puts weight on them, but he manages to keep his footing. As he stumbles towards the Prize Collection Booth an oversized moogle glares at him, mop in one hand, bucket in the other.

“Sorry,” Cloud gags.

The moogle man just shakes his Styrofoam head and walks towards the mess.

Cloud’s world still spins. The loops and the corkscrews have knocked, twisted, and tumbled the Golden Saucer theme music into a discordant, demonic taunt that echoes through his mushed brain.

Lights and shapes still flash across his vision; ghosts of targets, stars, and aliens are burnt onto his retina. He has not left Speed Square for, well, he isn’t sure, a day at the least. Over and over and over he rides the rollercoaster, shooting the laser gun at the targets that jump from the same spots every time. At first he would fail to reach the 2000 points required to win the prize, but now he had memorised the whole course and is pushing 4000 each go. The first time he pushed to the front of the queue security tried to throw him out, but one look at his oversized sword kept them at bay. Now Speed Square was shut off to all other customers as Cloud continued to ride the rollercoaster.

To her credit, the lady at the Prize Collection Booth still smiles and still bows as low as she did the first time. She knows the prize Cloud craves, but she is tied to the Golden Saucer’s Prize Randomisation Policy. It isn’t her fault, Cloud keeps reminding himself, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
“Congratulations! You win a prize!” She repeats the line with only the faintest quiver to her voice.
Cloud leans on the counter with bone-white knuckles, and she jumps back, momentarily losing her composure. With obvious reluctance, she places the X-Potion on the counter.

“God damn it no!” Cloud roars and sweeps the X-Potion aside, the glass vial smashing against the ground. “You know what I want!”

The Prize Collection Booth Lady bows profusely. “I’m sorry, sir, but the Golden Saucer Prize Randomisation Policy states that—“

“I don’t fucking care. I need—“

“Cloud!”

A hand on his shoulder. Cloud turns quickly—too quickly, almost spiralling into the ground. For a painful, delirious thousandth of a second he thinks it has worked, that she has returned, that Aeris is alive again. But he blinks again and this time he recognises Tifa. Her eyes are wide with horror.

“My God, Cloud. What are you doing?”

Cloud pushes her away and stumbles away from the Prize Collection Booth. He needs to buy another ticket.

“Cloud!” Tifa follows him. “This isn’t going to bring her back!”

Cloud rounds on her. “What the fuck else can I do, Tifa? Aeris is dead, you get it? Dead. The rest of you might not care but I can save her. I just need to take thirty-five 1/35 Soldiers to an old man in a cave near Junon, and this is the only way to get them.”

Tifa stands her ground. “Just like the 400 tornberries, Cloud? Just like the 99 megalixirs? I know you miss her, Cloud, but listen to yourself. These rumours you are following are clearly false.”

Cloud shakes his head. “No. This will work. I will bring her back.”

He turns and slams 10GP onto the ticket counter. “One please.”

“Cloud! Listen to me! You have sold our best materia, our best items. Meteor is going to destroy the world in a matter of days. We need to go stop Sephiroth. Now.”

“I need to save Aeris.”

“Cloud. She is dead.”

The rollercoaster slides up to the starting line. Cloud’s own vomit is still stained down the cart’s side. He steps over it and slides in behind the laser gun.

“Is this how you think she wants to be remembered? By you wasting your final days on a rollercoaster?
Cloud, we need you. She needs you.”

Cloud hesitates. He remembers Aeris’s eyes, her hair, the way she offered him that first flower.

The way she died in his arms.

“No.”

He pulls the safety harness down and locks it shut.

“I’m sorry, Tifa.”

“Cloud!”

She keeps shouting, but the wheels are already clicking as the chain drags the cart up the first slope. Cloud shuts his eyes and swallows the lump in his throat. When he opens them again, the hill is cresting and fireworks are exploding and lights are flashing. He grips the trigger.

“I’m coming, Aeris.”

New Writing: Open Worlds and Game Jams

2011-10-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Two pieces of writing I have been working on recently went live today. Firstly, I wrote this article over at Games On Net in which I try to distill my thoughts on why I am so excited about Skyrim. There is something special about a new open world that I really wanted to catch the soul of. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

And over at Ars Technica is Part One of my sit in of the Fabulous 48 Hour Game Competition. I spent practically the entire forty-eight hours at this thing and watched energy transfer from developer to crafted game like a zubat suck HP. Or some analogy like that. It was a thrilling weekend and I'm really excited with how this piece turned out, so please go over and read Part One and stay tuned for parts Two and Three, which I will add links to from this post when they go up. Also, over at the game competition's blog, a few of the games are already online and available to download and play, if the article makes you curious.

In other news, my Honours thesis is due on Monday, so in the coming weeks you can expect a link to that, too, if you have any interest in my academic writing.

El Shaddai Review

2011-10-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

My review of El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is now up at Pixel Hunt. You can read it if you want.

As will become apparent quickly enough if you do indeed read it, is that I got really, really bored with El Shaddai. This disappointed and frustrated me in equal measures. I love the games that try to do something different, something weird, something other than men-with-guns-in-corridors-shooting-alien-zombies. So I really wanted to like El Shaddai--so much that I tolerated its dreadfully boring play for hours just to give it a chance to get better. It was weird. It was experimental. It had weird colours! It deserved a chance, right?

But El Shaddai is creatively bankrupt. As I say in my review, the pretty visuals are just wallpaper on the corridor. My engagement with the world is so frivolous, so insignificant, that I might as well have been watching a video. But as this was meant to be a videogame, it was a video where I had to constantly hold down the 'play' button, and that gets old pretty quickly.

So as I was playing it and undeniably not enjoying myself, I kept thinking, "But I really like Rez." It seemed at first to be a weird game to be thinking of, but the two really have a lot in common in how they attempt to engage the player. The difference is only that Rez succeeds. Both are highly linear, require minimal interaction from the player, and rely heavily on their audiovisual representation. But this works for Rez. It doesn't work at all for El Shaddai. I think it is because Rez is skeletal, stripped back, wireframe and drumbeats--so a stripped back interaction with it worked. El Shaddai is lush, deep, multi-layered and complex--so a stripped back interaction with it just feels fraudulent.

So that is why the review talks about Rez before it talks about El Shaddai, which is probably breaking some game review style guide's rules or something. I don't dislike El Shaddai because it is weird and experimental. I dislike it because it is generic, dogmatic, and so devoid of any creativity beyond its pretty graphics that there is nothing unique there to experience. In short, it has no soul.

Gears of War 3 Review

2011-10-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote a review of Gears of War 3 over at Pixelhunt. You can read it now, if you want. It doesn't say everything I want to say about Gears of War 3, but Gears of War 3 is a huge game so there is a lot I want to say about it.

One thing my review didn't have space for was the excellent menu and stats system. Gears of Wars 2 was one of those few games on 360 where I wanted to track down and get as many achievements as I wanted, as they were actually enjoyable, additional things to do. Gears of War 3 channels this superbly by tracking your exact progress with every single achievement. Within the menus, you can find out exactly what collectables you are yet to find, exactly which weapon executions you are yet to achieve, exactly which campaign levels you still need to complete on what difficulty, etc. It makes going after the achievements even more enjoyable. The user-interface improvements stretch to multiplayer, too, with dropping in and out of groups and parties immensely easy without having to go to the dashboard.

Story wise, I talk about it a lot in the review, but I only touch on how much I love the Gears characters. Sure, they are all dude-bros, but that doesn't stop them from being characters. Epic has done an excellent job of crafting these personalities and their little nuanced reactions to different scenarios. For me, Gears of War isn't for dude-bros, it's about dude-bros. I find the relationship between Marcus and Dom especially interesting, especially in relation to how I have played through ever Gears of Wars' campaign. Namely, with my own brother on co-op with myself as Marcus and him as Dom. There is a moment later in Gears of War 3 which had a huge affect on this, but I won't spoil it yet and will save that for a later post. Though, the name of the chapter in-game pretty much spoils it anyway. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it reflects on its inevitability. Who knows!

I also have many ideas of how Gears of War can be read as a reflection on the futility and contradictory nature of modern masculinity, but that too can wait for a latter post. For now, I find it fascinating that for all their brawn, none of the Gears are equipped with whatever it is they need to save those they love. They are always coming up short and painfully aware of it. Even the cover system reflects this: you are not good enough to face them head-on. I think it captures something really interesting. I could stretch such a post to discuss the Locust as a non-phallic civilization because they don't build towers. You know, just to really annoy those that insist Gears of War is about nothing.

Anyway, there you go. Gears of War 3 is great and you should play it. Also, we should play it. My gamertag should be over there on the side somewhere. If you see me playing, feel free to drop in and help out with a few waves on Horde mode.

Ignorance is Bliss. Kill the Scientists.

2011-09-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

As I’m writing this, several Italian scientists are going on trial for manslaughter because (if I am understanding the news reports I have read correctly), they failed to predict an earthquake that killed over 300 people. Not because they caused the earthquake; not because they knew there would be an earthquake and didn’t tell anyone; but because they didn’t know there would be an earthquake. Essentially (and again, assuming I am reading this correctly), the scientists are being charged with the deaths of hundreds simply because they were unable to do something they hoped they would be able to do.

Months earlier, Australia’s top climate scientists began receiving abusive phone calls as well as death threats because of the work they have been doing towards better understanding global warming. As opposed to the Italian scientists being crucified for not doing something the general public wanted them to do, these scientists are being threatened for saying something no one wants to hear.

These are two pretty extreme examples of the fall out of what I see as a recent, pervasive trend of wanting to shoot the scientific messenger. Scientists try to understand the world and sometimes that means discovering things we would rather not know, such as how we are responsible for a progressively warming planet and rising sea levels. Instead of dealing with the problems, we move to discredit those delivering it. After all, it is easier to assume the world isn’t warming than it is to actually change our behaviours and societies enough to fix it.

Not helping is a rise in the fundamentalist and conservative right in both the press and politics of many countries that have an interest in not just discrediting climate change but also evolution, stem cell research, and many other strands of science. As such, over the past decades, the authority of scientists on a vast range of subjects has been eroded down to the same level as newspaper editorials, footpath vox pops, and angry bloggers. Many people don't want to hear from the brainy, ivory tower intellectuals about a topic; they want to hear from the average Joe.

Of course, this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Scientists have always been scapegoated for telling people what they don’t want to hear and not telling them what they do want to hear. It comes in waves, and at the moment, as we come to terms with just how unsustainable our first-world lives really are, we are certainly at the muddy bottom of the curve.

Personally, I find it all incredibly infuriating when I watch television and see creationism and evolution debated as equal ‘theories’, or when the secret agendas of a climate scientist's peer-reviewed findings are questioned by an oil company, but that is not an area I’m an expert in or tend to write on. What I find interesting, however, is how this general attitude to the sciences permeates and is reflected in our cultural texts. In particularly, two videogames I’ve played and loved in recent months I think could be seen as emerging from this culture that has become obsessed with discrediting and deriding the sciences.

Two caveats. One: There have been stories about well-meaning scientists making dumb mistakes and paying the consequences for them for as long as there has been scientists (Frankenstein, for instance), and I am not trying to say “Look at this entirely unique thing that has never happened before!”. Rather, I’m hoping to just point at what I see as a really interesting, recent emergence of it. Two: These games, I don’t for a minute believe, are intentionally forwarding some secret, anti-science agenda. Rather, they simply reflect the culture they are produced in.

The first game is Halfbrick’s amazing Jetpack Joyride. Jetpack Joyride is the definitive moment where Canabalt stopped referring to a group of games mimicking Saltsman’s game and started referring to an actual genre. Jetpack Joyride has a simple framing narrative set up mostly in the game’s trailer: playable character Barry is a down-and-out blue collar who is sick of his day job and decides to steal a machinegun jetpack from the top secret science lab. After blowing through the wall and sending scientists flying, Barry straps on the backpack and the player must use the jetpack (and a range of other contraptions) to avoid electric zappers and missiles while collecting coins and getting as far as possible. The gameplay is so simple, so intuitive, yet so compelling, so diverse, and so intuitive. It is a phenomenal game and if you own an iOS device and have yet to own it, you are doing yourself a great disservice. But what stands out most in Jetpack Joyride is the insane amount of polish that has gone into the game—something that Halfbrick is already well known for after their successful Fruit Ninja. The shockwaves from explosions, the “thud” of the Little Stomper vehicle’s footsteps, the thrust of the jetpack all feel so good.

One such detail is the little scientists running around beneath you. The little guys are panicking, helpless, and clueless as you destroy their lab and send bullets flying everywhere. It’s as though they have no idea how to react to Barry stealing their device. They run back and forward, they get in the road of rockets, get capped by your bullets, immolated by your flames, and zapped by the zappers. Sometimes, they just slip over.

It’s meant to be funny, watching them run around and get zapped, and it truly is. The scientists also come into play in the games mission structure, with objectives such as high-fiving (i.e. running past) scientists and achievements for avoiding them. But, ultimately, Jetpack Joyride is a product of a culture influenced by politicians and the press determined to discredit and degrade scientists. Everything in the portrayal of the scientists and of Barry in relationship to the scientists is about portraying the supposedly-intelligent scientists as actually dumb and brought down to the same level as the supposedly-yokel blue-collar worker who is actually in charge. It’s a revenge fantasy, really. Look at how dumb the stupid scientists are. Not so smart now, eh? I have your contraption and you don’t have any answers as to what to do about it.

The other game is also an iOS title, but one that is probably far less known. This game is League of Evil, and you play a brawny cyborg who must punch the heads off evil scientists. Again, League of Evil is a great game. Despite the on-screen controls, it is one of the better sidescrollers on iOS and has a real Super Meat Boy Lite kind of feel. But, again, it is possible to read it as emerging from an anti-science culture. Unlike Jetpack Joyride’s scientists, the unquestioningly evil scientists of League of Evil just stand there, waiting for you to punch their heads off. It’s the brawn’s time to shine.

In fairness, this is part and parcel of being a videogame—it is easier to put the player in control of a character whose strength lies in physical abilities than intellectual ones. When you press a button on your controller, you generally want to see something tangible happen in the videogame’s world. It’s something that Half Life 2 comments on when Barney remarks how useful Gordon Freeman’s MIT doctorate was for pulling a lever. So usually, if not the bad guy, the scientist is rarely in a role more noble than sidekick, the one giving the brawny main dude his cool gadgets. Snake has Otakon, Bond has Q, Ezio has de Vinci.

So it is not as though Jetpack Joyride and League of Evil have made scientists the victims/enemies simple because “society hates science nowadays” or anything so reductive. But rather, the way the scientists are presented as dumb, degraded, and helpless offers an interesting lens through which we can see how the prolonged treatment of scientists and science within the media and by our politicians is perhaps starting to drip down into an everyday perception of science as untrustworthy, annoying, and dangerous.

Split Screen: Freedom in Alcatraz

2011-09-17T23:35:00.000-07:00

I have commenced a new column at Kill Screen that is all about playable characters and how they control us. The first, introductory column went up this week and is all about Alcatraz of Crysis 2 and The Shawshank Redemption. It also has an amazing piece of art by Daniel Purvis. If you read it, I'd love to hear what you think about it.

I am Waaaaggghhh

2011-09-17T23:26:00.000-07:00

I really like Warhammer 40,000. Not so much the tabletop game (which I suck at) or the miniatures (which I love but, again, suck at) but the fictional universe itself. I love the idea of the Imperium of Man as this futuristic, zealous, fundamentalist movement where humanity itself is the religion. I always found it a fascinating mix of medieval zeal and distopic science-fantasy and continued to devour many novels set among its stars even after I gave up the tabletop game and diverted my funds away from the miniatures to buying more videogames.

Still, despite my love of the fiction, I did not find myself too interested in Space Marine before it came out. I was never too interested in Orks, and as fascinated as I was with the Imperium of Man, I always found Ultramarines to be the drabbest of many drab Space Marine chapters. But then I watched the cinematic trailer (I'm a sucker for cinematic trailers) and had a change of heart when I saw that Chaos would be making an appearance, too. Ultimately, the trailer convinced me that the game successfully captured the feel and vibe of the 40K universe, and that was enough for me.

I'm glad I did because Space Marine is really, really fun. The boltguns feel meaty and the melee is visceral. Shooting and hacking is streamed beautifully so combat slides fluidly from picking off enemy gunners with a scoped rifle to thinning out the hordes with the boltgun before throwing yourself fully into the remainder with chainsword or power axe to pick off those that are left--and there will always be many left. Combat is repetitive and button-mashy, but this quick three-act cycle of distant/mid/close combat gives it a really steady, thumping rhythm that is pleasurable despite its repetition.

The game's feel has been polished well so that the combat is accentuated brilliantly. Orks have this kind of satisfying 'splat' of blood when the fatal bullet impacts them, as though their body expels all the blood remaining in their veins as they die. This offers a vital piece of information to the player, informing them thatone target is dead and they can move onto the next, but it is also, simply, really satisfying to feel your opponents pop like that. It is an odd comparison, perhaps, but the closest game that 'feels' like that to me is Geometry Wars 2. The enemies, when they die, have the same kind of chunk, meaty, splatting nuance to them. This splat is missing from close combat, but that is hardly a problem as it will be a rare occasion that you fell an ork in melee and its body is still in one piece.

Though, unfortunately, the game is still chunky and clumsy in places. The narrative is rarely convincing and poorly communicated to the player. Often, it feels as though the characters have had a conversation while the player was out of the room, and the player is the only one present who doesn't know something. One example: the space marines see a weird ork contraption in the distance and one of them ponders "What is that?!" Minutes later, you are approaching it and your character says "Quickly! We must destroy the ork ram!" Oh, okay. I guess it is a ram then. I'm glad we figured that out and no one told me. It is always minor things, but it jars with the progression of the story in quite a few places. Also, for a game about space marines, there are precious few space marines present. If not for one vox transmission too far into the game's second chapter, I would have sworn the Emperor only deployed three single space marines to take out an ork infestation. Ultimately, the narrative feels like a condiment to the game and in no way integral to it.

Which is odd as the worldbuilding is excellent. Everything feels like Warhammer 40K. The universe, the species, the imperium are all depicted perfectly so that simply engaging with that fiction makes the game enjoyable. The way the space marines tower over the imperial guardsmen, the humility and zeal, the pride and lack of compassion all feel superb. The ork models are vibrantly coloured as though they were picked right out of the pages of a White Dwarf magazine. Everything looks and feels like 40K and this more than makes up for the clumsy, poorly delivered narrative.

There are also glitches here and there, such as enemies getting stuck on walls or allies teleporting onto lifts or audio diaries playing simultaneously with squadmate chatter. Also, all space marines and orks seem to have come from the same region of England, but none of this gets in the road of the rollicking fun of shooting and chopping through orks. Sadly, though, one thing does: Chaos.

When Chaos rocks up about four chapters into the game, things begin to go downhill insofar as the fundamental fun of combat begins to decline. Significantly, the pleasurable 'splat' of a dead ork is not present with the chaos demons. The demons have a long, drawn out death animation that every single demon plays out exactly the same way when they die as your power axe just keeps swinging through them as though they have already returned to the warp. The few Chaos Space Marines I have fought so far, too, are hardly enjoyable to fight. Your bolts no longer explode in the flesh but ting insignificantly off power armour. The gameplay has been tuned to make fighting orks fun in a 1-vs-1000 kind of style. But Chaos Space Marines are your equal, and this doesn't sit well in the game's framework. Ultimately, fighting Chaos is unsatisfying.

Which is interesting, as it was the presence of Chaos that convinced me to try the game out. But once they appear, it becomes painfully clear that the game was not designed for them. Perhaps a more Gears of War-based cover shooter would be more enjoyable against Chaos Space Marines, as then you could bunker down and fight against them as equals. But Space Marine is designed for you to jump unafraid into a horde of orks and to be confident that you can come out of it on the other side alive and covered in the blood of greenskins.

The game itself seems to realise this. Not long after Chaos arrived, they now seem to have disappeared again as I go back to helping Guardsmen fight the orks. I'm sure they'll appear again soon, though, and hopefully something changes to make them more enjoyable to fight. But for now, Space Marine seems to be a good case study against putting something in a game just because you can. Sure, Chaos fits with the fiction of the 40K universe and they have been as beautifully realised within the game as every other element, but in the style of play that Space Marine demands, they are just no fun to fight. But for now, splatting orks is more than making up for them.

Do Videogames Need To Be Fun?

2011-08-24T03:59:00.000-07:00

So while I was in Melbourne for Freeplay, I found myself participating in a discussion over at Kotaku Australia about ~~what a videogame 'is~~' whether videogames have to be fun. Perhaps I said something you will find interesting. If not, the other very intelligent people in the discussion surely did.

Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto

2011-08-21T18:32:00.000-07:00

So Freeplay is over now. Just as last year’s festival, it was a vibrant and energy-filled few days of great talks, great drinks, and great people. The games ‘industry’ might be in the ashes stage of its phoenix-like life cycle, but the community is as strong and as full of ideas as it ever was. Just like last year, I am now super excited about the developers, academics, writers, and players in this country and the kinds of things they are able to achieve when given (or, as is most often the case, when they forcibly take) the opportunity.

Yet, despite this, a couple of panels of today, Sunday, the final day of the festival, raised quite a few issues in regards to videogame journalism and videogame criticism. Firstly, in a discussion about supporting and marketing and financing indie projects, I was surprised to sense a kind of underlying tone where it seemed to be implied that the mainstream gaming press doesn’t care about indie games and that they only report on the next Modern Warfare or round of hats for Team Fortress 2. Certainly, go to any major gaming news website and this will be what you predominately see, but only because that is predominately what the gaming websites get sent. If you, as an indie, were to send the editor of a mainstream gaming news site some press pack about your indie title, chances are they will run with it if it is interesting. Game journalists are just as desperate and keen and passionate about new gaming experiences as their readers and players generally are. If you make it, they won’t come. But if you make it and you give it to them, they will almost certainly talk about it.

So this is my first point and it is a lot tidier and self contained than the rest of this inevitable rant will be. The second final panel of the day was called “The Words We Use” and, essentially, was about videogame criticism and journalism. I was pretty excited there was a panel talking about criticism at a primarily developer-focused event. More so, there were actual journalists and critics on the panel. Great! On the panel was Andrew McMillen (a great journalist of many hats), Alison Croggon (a theater critic), Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation fame), and Drew Taylor, formerly a THQ PR peep and a videogame culture guy who started the magazine JumpButton.

So two things upfront. Firstly, I have a huge amount of respect for each of the individual panelists and their work. Secondly, the panel was the most infuriating thing I have ever witnessed.

My hands were tremblings and my heart was beating erratically every sentence that was said. I tweeted so much I lost 30% of the battery of my phone (but gained about fifty new followers, so hi!).

I don’t want to write here a rundown of the entire presentation, or to pick apart specific things specific people said. I also don’t want to talk about the very problematic gender issues that were brought up (very, very, poorly) by the panel’s chair (who, bafflingly, I don’t believe was a journalist, a critic, or a person who has read anything written about games for the past decade or two). Neither do I want to attack any of the individual panelists. As I said, I highly respect the work of all of them. I can’t stress that enough.

Rather, I want to focus on what most infuriated me about the panel. What ultimately caused the argument and its tone to be so, well, dumb, was due to what I think are much vaster issues in and around videogame writing, and the things that were said at this panel hit it home pretty hard that these things are really quite serious problems for those of us who care about videogame writing. So I think it is more constructive to talk about these problems than to throw harpoons at the speakers themselves. The fact they seem so oblivious to these following things should be a wake-up call to us that we need to do something about these problems. These problems, in list form are:

1. The conflation of videogame journalism, videogame criticism, and journalism about videogames into one interchangeable term.

2. The erroneous idea that videogame journalists should give a shit about developers.

3. The presumption that videogame criticism is ‘too intellectual’ and pretentious and doesn’t actually matter to ‘general players’.

4. The possibility that videogame criticism is, actually, perhaps too pretentious.

So let me hit on these one by one. Themes and arguments will probably overlaps and be out of whack but hear me out and let us see where this goes.

1. The Conflation of Terms

So firstly, the conflation of videogame journalism, videogame criticism, and journalism about videogames. In the panel, these different-but-related things were often used as interchangeable terms for the same thing—namely big, mainstream gaming news sites that just repeat the press releases given to them by a publisher, as though that thin sliver of a fraction is all the writing about videogames that is out there. This could not be further from the truth. These are, in fact, three completely different things. There are gaming news sites whose primary purpose is to tell the consumers of games what games are coming out, when they will be out, and what they will be like. This is, for my purpose, videogame journalism. It is an enthusiast press written for an audience that simply wants to know what is coming out. That such a press might copy press releases word for word is not a problem because it is not attempting to be a critical engagement. It is just telling people who want to know what is coming out, what is coming out.

But that does not mean we can not have great journalism about videogames. The most recent exemplar of this is Andrew McMillen’s “Why Did L.A Noire Take Seven Years To Make?”. Another superb example would be Tracey Lien’s look at “The Rise and Fall of Red Ant”. Yet another would be Leigh Alexander's "No Female Heroes at Activision?" These pieces are great, investigative pieces of journalism written about videogames and the videogame industry. Often (but not always) these pieces are written by the same people who write what I am calling above ‘videogame journalism’ simply because, well, they are journalists who write about videogames. Often, too, they are on the same websites, as the same readership will be interested in it. But they are not the same thing and they are not comparable. Just because one is super investigative and deep and explores things others would want hidden and the other is copy-pasting a press statement, doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other. They are serving different purposes.

And then there is videogame criticism which is yet another entirely different (though closely related) thing. Those three journalism articles linked in the previous paragraph? Not criticism. I won’t dare try to define here what criticism ‘is’ but, broadly, it is the stuff out there on other blogs. On this blog. Linked to on Critical Distance and written by Tom Bissell in Extra Lives or on Grantland and spoken by Yahtzee in Zero Punctuation and written by Kirk Hamilton at Kill Screen and the list goes on. But it is more than that. It is the Red vs Blue machinima movies. It is every Livejournal about The Sims. Criticism, broadly, is not about what a videogame will be or even what a videogame is. It is about an experience. Generally, that is the experience of playing a game, not of developing a game, as most criticism is (and should be) about playing the videogame and the individual, subjective experience of playing that videogame and what you, personally, felt from that. This doesn't mean a designer cannot write about their own experience of playing that game as a designer (more on that below). If nothing in this paragraph sounds like anything you have ever engaged with, go read “Bow Nigga” and come back here. Seriously. Read it now. The point is criticism isn't about 'story' and it isn't about mechanics; it is about experience.

Games criticism is not about how good or bad a game is but about the experience you had interacting with that game. You might scoff and say “But what is the point? Does it help me design a better videogame? Does it tell me if I should buy this game?” No. Well, it might, but it doesn’t have to. Rather, criticism is about what you experience when you play a videogame. There was a talk the previous day about archiving videogames and hardware, and it bothered me that there was no talk about archiving criticism because that is how we archive how a game was experienced. That Moment in Bioshock or That Moment in Portal matter because of the lived experience of playing that moment and the 20-odd hours of moments beforehand. This is why videogames struggle to permeate broader culture: because if you don’t play that game for 20 hours, you don’t ‘get’ why it was significant. Criticism bridges this gap. Putting a controller into someone’s hand who has never played Bioshock before and making them play the ‘Would You Kindly’ scene will have no impact on them whatsoever other than reinforce ideas of how violent videogames are. Make that same person read any great piece of criticism about that scene and why it was so powerful, and they will get it.

If you want videogames to ‘matter’ to the rest of culture and society, then you need good videogame criticism.

So, again, this criticism is often written by the same people writing the above journalisms. But, again, it is fulfilling a different purpose. I have much, much, much more to say about the significance and proliferation of criticism that already exists but I guess I will get to that. But for now, the three things are not the same. They are closely related; they overlap; but they serve a different purpose and are written in different ways. You can not measure them all with the same yardstick, as this panel was trying to do.

2. The Erroneous Idea

One panel member made the observation about how, when he was in PR for a game publisher, it was so frustrating to see a game get a bad review (a 5!) even though they had told the reviewer that the game was still buggy. This turned into a further rant (partially continued on Twitter) about the ability for a bad review to close studios so, ultimately, reviewers and journalists should be careful about writing bad things about games.

No. They should not.

The videogame journalist is writing for the consumer. If they were to not warn them not to buy a shit product, then they would not be doing their jobs properly. When I write a review, I don’t care if it could mean the difference between you, as a developer, still having a job or not. I care if the game, if my experience of the game (because a review is at least as much criticism as it is consumer advice) is not decent. If it isn’t, I would be a poor writer if I did not tell my readers that.

However! If I was writing an investigative journalism piece into the many, many issues with the industry (as many of the best pieces often are, as the above examples) then, clearly, the developer and the developer’s concerns are mine. But when I write a review, when any reviewer worth her salt writes critically about a game, be it as consumer advice or not, the developer’s career should be the last thing on their mind.

3. The Presumption of Pretentiousness

So now I am back to ranting about criticism in what perhaps infuriated me more about the panel than any other moment (except, perhaps, the one sentence within which the chair somehow managed to fit a dick joke, a bukkake joke, and a question about gender equality). On the panel was Yahtzee, of Zero Punctuation fame. I want to stress that I love Zero Punctuation. It is crude, yes, but it is funny and consistent and self-effacing and, underneath it all, often hits very close to home about what does and doesn’t work in a game, albeit in very exaggerated terms. Now, Yahtzee was kind of held up on the panel as The Critic while the others were Journalists. Someone (again I think it was the chair) made the observation (if one could call it that) that videogame criticism goes hand-in-hand with humour, non-seriousness, and phallic jokes. Someone else said videogame criticism often tries too hard to be ‘intellectual’ and is only written for a small ‘niche’ of readers.

You are fucking kidding me.

So game conferences generally and Freeplay specifically seem to always be about how videogames are really something worth caring about. They mean something to us, they are art, they matter, they are cultural objects and we need them to seep into broader culture so that the significant, meaningful, artistic contributions that all games and play can make to society can indeed be made. That is the general kind of vibe. Videogames matter and we must move beyond the stereotypes.

In which case, why the hell should our game criticism pander and dwell on the same damn stereotypes? ‘Too intellectual’?! No. Videogames are smart, compelling, meaningful things and the intellectual writing about them is exactly the writing that portrays this fact to a broader culture. You want videogames to matter and be respected as intellectual? Then you fucking well need some intellectual criticism of your games.

And guess what? It is not a small ‘niche’ of readers and writers. There is a whole internet, maybe a whole two internets of thoughtful intelligent games writing. I’m not just talking about its formalised institutions like Kill Screen and the blogs often seen on Critical Distance (but they are a huge part of it and not even they were acknowledged by this panel), but every Dwarf Fortress story illustrated for a forum post. Ever Sim who has its own LiveJournal. There is so much intelligent criticism about what games are, what games mean, and why games matter and to not even mention that at a panel about videogame writing is a huge disservice to everyone associated to the culture and industry of videogame design and play.

And it is not just some anti-developer style of writing, either. Developers, programmers, coders, marketers, everyone has a crucial, unique perspective to bring to videogame criticism. Nels Anderson and Matthew Gallant are two superb examples that come to mind with great blogs full of criticism from a design perspective and well worth the read even if you never want to design a game yourself. Similarly, the criticism about playing games is interesting even if you never want to play a game yourself. I can’t stress this point enough: good criticism is where videogames stop being “lol videogames” and become accepted culture.

But what it all comes down to is that the word ‘intellectual’ should never be said as a negative point of any kind of creative process. Ever. If games are intellectual (which they are), then they deserve intellectual criticism.

4. The Possibility That Pretentiousness Actually Exists

So that was my high horse. Hopefully it inspires you enough to go start your own criticism blog. Because in videogames, everyone should be a critic. Everyone should be writing about their experiences and talking about their experiences and sharing their experiences. But, in reality, a lot of people don’t.

A panel on videogame criticism seemed entirely unaware of the vast blogosphere that exists and even of the more formalised outlets such as Kill Screen or even Extra Lives. And, earlier in the day, as talked about at the start of this rant, a whole bunch of indies thought game writers of any creed didn’t care for them at all.

What if us videogame critics have indeed built an ivory tower for ourselves? Or, rather, what if we have somehow managed to convince everyone on the ‘outside’ that such an ivory tower exists? I for one think it doesn’t exist. I quite literally blogged my way into videogame writing and I believe that if you are a good writer who has something interesting to say about videogames, you will be heard.
But are we more cut off from the world than we (or at least I) believe? Not even just non-gaming culture, but gaming culture, too? No one on this panel seemed to be aware of the broader videogame criticism out there. Is this an actual problem? Are we too self-absorbed. Are we even a we? I hope we aren’t a we, because I think we are just the players. All of them. All the people who have a stake in having real, actual experiences of these games and those experiences are worth recording and worth remembering and worth sharing. So I don’t know. I hope ‘we’ are an open community and that anyone who wants to write about games does write about games and, further, I hope we are reaching or can reach the broader gaming community of players and developers alike.

Developers need criticism, and criticism needs developers. Journalism about videogames is not always videogame journalism. All these things and entities are related and inseparable but they are not all the same thing. To treat them as such is a disservice to all of them.

Most importantly, and the single most crucial thing I want to say in response to the panel is that videogame criticism is out there. So much of it. It is so intelligent and so thoughtful and so well written and all of it is worth reading. Perhaps you have never engaged with it and you are only reading this because you added me to Twitter during Freeplay this year. If that is you, the least you can do is read Ben Abraham’s slide from the (un)Keynote as well as Critical Distance’s weekly blogroll. But there is so much more out there. On the mainstream news sites, in magazines (Edge, Hyper, and PC Powerplay are all incorporating more critically-minded sections of late). Just as crucially: you can write it too. Don’t say what the game is about, say what you experienced. That’s it. And videogames takes one little step closer to being as respected as it should be by the rest of society.

As one last final aside, if you do want to write videogame criticism yourself (please do!) but you have no idea how to, it is simple. Firstly, read Kieron Gillen's manifesto on New Games Journalism. Secondly, write what you feel. That's it. If our Ivory Tower exists, we would love to have you move in with us.

[Update - Katie Williams has also written up a reflection on this year's Freeplay and the role of this panel within the festival that I think is well worth a read. She does a far better job of putting this one panel in perspective to the rest of the festival than I have.

And @SearingScarlet (Sorry, I don't know their real name) has written the best post I have seen so far to deal with the gender-related problems of the panel which you should really read, too.

And Andrew McMillen, one of the panelists, has uploaded his recording of the panel if you wish to hear it for yourself.

And Ben Abraham has written an opinion piece for Gamasutra about the sexism and gender issues that bubbled over during the panel. You should absolutely read this.

And two of Australia's (if not the world's) best female videogame journalists have had a discussion on Kotaku Australia about the issues and concerns of being a non-male videogame writer. It is an excellent post and it is great to see two such notable female writers having the guts to speak out on such a topic when doing so is so often a suicide-by-comment-section. Fortunately, the Kotaku Australia commenters seem engaged, polite, and interesting. Read it. Katie Williams then wrote a second post sort of in response to this one that is both personal and heartbreaking and makes me hate all males ever including myself. You should read it as this shit totally isn't cool.

And Freeplay director Paul Callaghan has addressed the panel and the reaction to it on Freeplay's official blog. He also apologised, which I don't believe is fair. Paul is an amazing man who (with others) does a phenomenal job every year pulling Freeplay together to be the awesome festival it is. Still, you can read his thoughts on the reaction to the panel here.

And panel chair Leigh Klaver has written a post justifying (I guess) and clarifying the panel. To be completely honest, I don't really think it addresses anything but instead shows how disengaged he is with the broader sphere of critical videogame writers by not including a single link to any of the pieces written about the panel by other writers and a reference to only one of said pieces. This is not necessarily an insult aimed at Klaver, but is perhaps indicative of just how closed off this sphere is. Who knows. I am not satisfied with his responses to the gender issues, either. Still, to be fair, he deserves a chance to explain so give him a read.

If you see any other articles on the panel around the place, please leave a link to them in the comments.]

Bastion: A Review and Some Further Thoughts on Choice and Inevitability

2011-07-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

Firstly, I wrote a review of Bastion for Paste Magazine. You can read it here, and perhaps you should before you read the rest of this post so I don't have to repeat myself. But if you don't feel like it, here is a run down: Bastion is an utterly beautiful and melancholy game that makes you care for a world that no longer exists. There. That should be all you need for the rest of this post. Also, the rest of this post will contain spoilers for both Bastion and Grand Theft Auto IV so perhaps don't read on if you are yet to complete Bastion at least once.

At the end of Bastion you have to make a couple of choices. The first one is potentially heartbreaking, but not relevant to what I want to say here so I won't go into any details. The second one is what I am concerned with here. At the end of Bastion you can choose to do two things: either rewind time to before the Calamity ripped the world to shreds, or use the Bastion as some kind of airship to fly off and find new lands. However, both have consequences. If you rewind time and 'unbreak' the world, 'you' will cease to exist anymore. The Kid, Rucks, and Zia will have no memory of the post-Calamity world--something that would be hard enough to give up if Zia did not admit right towards the end that she has only ever known happiness since the Calamity. Further, there is no guarantee that people will not make the same mistake and simply cause the Calamity all over again. The consequences of continuing on, of using the Bastion as an airship to fly off into the sunset is two-fold: firstly, obviously, it means the Calamity will never be undone. Ever. Secondly (and more vaguely), the world around you will be irreversibly damaged as you take off. Or something. The game is not overly clear on this point but it seems to me that all the beasts and Ura in the vicinity will be destroyed by you choosing to fly off on the Bastion to find new lands. Perhaps I misread this, though.

It was a hard choice to make and, ultimately, I did not feel as though I had 'completed' the game until I played through it twice and made each choice. The first time I decided to turn back time. At that point, it was the obvious choice. Having heard so many stories about the pre-Calamity world from Rucks's tales, I needed to save it--or rather, to give it a second chance to save itself.

The second time through, when I played "New Game Plus" (which is essentially a new game where you keep you experience and weapons and the enemies get more difficult to reflect this), it was clear that this was not a distinct, 'other' game. The continuation of my character as well as some slight, clever changes in the narration made it clear to me that the Calamity had happened again. So on this playthrough, it made sense to make the other choice, to move forward into the future and not to stagnate in the past. It was bittersweet, of course, as it meant saying goodbye to the world I had wanted to visit for two generations of myself now, but it was filled with a sense of hope and optimism. There was me, Zia, and Rucks, and we were going to explore a brave new world.

The beauty of this was the the utter gravity of my choice to say goodbye to the pre-Calamity world was painfully apparent largely due to my previous playthrough. Because of that playthrough, I knew that turning back time yet again was inevitable. We often say that videogame narratives are about being able to answer the "what if" question. "What if I did this, not that." Bastion answers the question brutally by making you see that what happens is not pretty and then asking you to choose again.

Of course, the flaw of this is that not everyone makes the choice in the order I made them. I feel as though the game is attempting to set up the choices to be made in that order by trying to tie you down to the world with Rucks's sweet, sweet voice, but some players will certainly choose the future their first time through. This, then, destabilises the meta-narrative that, for me, ran through both playthroughs. It's a weakness of the story that i feel Bastion was trying to tell but one that is in no way new to videogames: the player will rarely do what the storyteller wants them to do.

Only one other game felt as incomplete until I played it twice and made the different choice: Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar's games always have that inevitability streak, but never has it hit me so hard as it did in Grand Theft Auto IV. Towards the end of the game, Niko makes the choice to either work for a man that previously betrayed him (and make a lot of money) or to kill the man for vengeance (and make no money). His cousin, Roman, wants him to take the money. His girlfriend, Kate... well, she doesn't want him to get revenge, but she doesn't want him to take the money, either. Either way, Niko has promised himself, his cousin, and Kate that this is it, that he will get himself out of this sink-pit of crime once he does this One Last Thing.

So the player makes the choice. Long story short, if you take the money (what Roman wanted you to do), then Roman gets shot dead at his wedding; if you take revenge (what Kate kind of wanted but not really) then Kate gets shot dead at Roman's wedding. The way the narrative progresses, both endings make sense based on the choices you made, and both leave Niko devastated at the end of the game's narrative.

The first time through the game you think "what if". What if you had just taken the money? Kate would still be alive. What if you had walked away? Roman would still be alive. So you play again; you make the other choice; and Niko simply loses someone else he loves. It kind of makes Niko Bellic one of gaming's few tragic characters. The utter helplessness of the situation he gets himself in becomes all the more apparent when you make a different choice and end up at a similarly dark conclusion--if you can call an aimless existence in a foreign city with the specter of a loved one haunting you a conclusion.

Neither of these games do this inevitability-through-choice perfectly. Bastion's hinges on makes choices in a certain order for the full impact to hit the player. Meanwhile, many people had enough trouble getting through one complete game of Grand Theft Auto IV, let alone two. But it is something I would like to see games exploit more often.

My Thesis. By Others.

2011-07-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

When I uploaded a draft abstract of my thesis back in April, I promised I would continue to write updates about it here. Alas, I have failed to do that. In part this is because I've constantly had other writing obligations and in part it has been because the only times recently that thoughts related to my thesis have been coherent enough to publish is when I am actually writing it. At the moment I am struggling through Chapter One, which I'm hoping will allow me to situate where the player-character relationship sits, stradling the fourth-wall between the actual and virtual worlds (or something like this). Anyway, as I have been failing to write anything coherent about it, I have instead been writing incoherent rambles over at Google+ with which to have conversations with people about my ill-formed ideas.

And conversations I have had! Every post has seen a stack of thoughtful engagement and bouncing of ideas back and fourth and has been really useful for my writing and for forming my ideas. Most surprisingly, these rambles have actually got other people thinking and writing in areas related to the player-character relationship. In particular, Adrian Forest has written a blog post at Three Parts Theory called "Inhabiting Game Spaces" which brings together the relationship between player and character in regards to his primary interest in videogame spaces. Further, Kris Ligman has written a post at Popmatters about videogames, characters, and fourth walls and in doing so has rendered one of my incoherent rambles coherent. Both posts are an excellent read and in a weird, cyclical, nonlinear, new media kinda way, will hopefully end up being cited in my final thesis.

As for my rambles, if you wish to read them yourself, let me know and I will add you to the appropriate circles on Google+.

Big Concerns about Tiny Towers

2011-07-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

I have been playing the horrifically addictive iOS game Tiny Tower an awful lot lately. To justify the many, many hours the game has taken away from me, I went and wrote a review of it for Paste Magazine that you can read here.

While I was predominately positive in my review and gave the game a good score, the design of the game is potentially problematic and ethically unsound. Jorge Albor wrote a great piece for Popmatters discussing some of the (very valid) criticisms of Tiny Tower that my review just skims over, and follows it up with a few more remarks at Experience Points also worth reading.

Ultimately, Tiny Tower is 'addictive' in the most literal sense of the word, not in the casual 'really fun' sense that we tend to use in writing about videogames. It is designed in such a way that not playing it becomes more and more difficult the more you play it. Truly, it is like a drug: an unarguably enjoyable experience that probably isn't really good for you to do too often.

Anyway, I won't waste more words repeating Jorge or myself here. I find it interesting (and perhaps worrying) that I am enjoying a game so much despite the flaws that I am completely aware of.

Child of Rez

2011-06-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

Rez had no right to be a good game. Its level of interactivity is down there with point-and-click adventures, Heavy Rain, and shopping mall directories. You move along on automatic rails, merely moving a crosshair over targets that appear in the same place every time you play. You point at things and they die. This is all there is to it. To get away with such minimal interaction most games would require an extensive narrative, but Rez has about as little story as it does interactivity. There is an artificial intelligence trapped in a computer network and you are trying to free it. That is pretty much it. Yet, despite this lack of interaction and story, Rez manages to be an utterly engaging experience.

So when Twitter assured me I could still enjoy Child of Eden without a Kinect, picking it up was a no-brainer. I tried not to get too excited; I tried not to expect too much, but the very fact that I had no idea what to expect probably, contrarily, made me more excited. When I first played Rez on an Official Playstation Magazine demo disc (that I had purchased for the metal Gear Solid 2 demo) I had no idea what it was I was experiencing. Rez was the most unique gaming experience I had ever encountered when I first played it and, despite knowing better, I was hoping for something just as new this time around.

Sadly, though, the first thing you notice about Child of Eden is that it is not so much a spiritual successor of Rez as it is a direct sequel. Mechanically, very little has changed. You hold down a button while moving a crosshair around the screen, lock onto a maximum of eight targets, then release the button to fire and watch those targets explode into dazzling displays of light and sound. It relies on the same music/visual/haptic synthesis (though, I would argue not synesthesia) with the bass-thud vibrating through the controller, the handclapping of the crosshair when no target it locked, the psychotic and nonsensical worlds pulsing along to the beat. It's all there. The only mechanical difference is the baffling need to hold down a different button to fire the tracer at purple projectiles. I understand that with a Kinect, the tracer and the normal laser can be fired simultaneously, but with a controller you can only fire one or the other, which means many targets will escape as you try to control the fiddly crosshair to destroy the fifty missiles hurtling towards you with all the speed of a drifting continent. It's Child of Eden's only real mechanical innovation and also its weakest element.

Yet, despite the mechanical overlap, Rez and Child of Eden differ greatly in terms of thematic, aesthetic content. Just like Rez, every element of Child of Eden complements and build towards a central, consistent theme, and it is interesting to look at how the two games differ in this regard. Both games explore (in their own very abstract ways) the relationship between humans and technology, between consciousness and artificial intelligence, between the 'real' world and the virtual world. In Rez, you are trying to liberate an artificial intelligence construct from within a computer network (interestingly, the a.i.'s name is Eden). In Child of Eden, you are trying to rescue a real human's consciousness from within the internet (the internet now being known as Eden). Or something like that. The stories are not very coherent--or important, for that matter. Still, the little synopses for each game highlight the intertwined themes both games deal with and the subtly different perspectives and nuances of each.

As Rez's Eden is a fundamentally technological being, so too are Rez's aesthetics. All the game's visuals and sounds reflect themes of technology, science, computers, artificial intelligence, etc. The visuals are all rigid wireframes and flat polygons; the music is all techno beeps and industrial thuds. The playable character's health, too, is portrayed literally in its technological/visual layers. At lowest health, the character's model is a simple sphere, representative perhaps of a single vertices. As the player obtains more health, the character evolves first to a wireframe model before obtaining a mesh, polygons, textures, and, at the final stage, seems to become a living human child. Perhaps, ultimately, Rez is about technology aspiring to become 'actual' life.

Child of Eden's girl-that-requires-saving, on the other hand, is fundamentally human and the game's aesthetics are all about technological invasions on organic life. The jagged wireframe edges and flat polygons have been replaced with curving, twisting, sparkling tentacles and petals and waves. The robotic, rigid, Tron-like enemies are now bubbles and birds and cells and flowers. The music is less industrial electronic and more trancey pop complete with vocal tracks and chimes. Even the fact that the game is intended to be played with Kinect--with the player's own limbs--rather than the traditional controller shows the emphasis shift from the technological to the organic, with a complete absence of any playable character from the screen.

Yet, despite the emphasis on organic life, Child of Eden just feels stagnant next to Rez. Rez had a sense of motion to it, of constant progression and evolution that Child of Eden failed to instill. In Rez you were always moving forward, moving deeper into the virtual world as you got closer to the central mainframe where the girl was trapped. The music, too, evolved and built as each level progressed from complete silence to a multi-layered harmony. Everything synthesised like clockwork. The visuals and audio always felt like they were working together to the extent that it was often hard to tell if something was a sound effect or part of the music.

In Child of Eden, often that sense of progress is not there. Much of the game plays out like Rez's boss stages: just you floating in one spot as an enemy evolved and unwraps before you. The music doesn't build so much as just shift from one pop cacophony to another. I don't feel like I am moving forward or progressing at all; I am just sitting in the one spot waiting for the pretty lights to appear so I can shoot them. In Rez I was trying to get somewhere; in Child of Eden I was just trying to survive.

But then again, that's life, isn't it? Life is messy, chaotic, unruly, unfair. Rez is uniform, neat, and clockwork like computer systems tend to be, but Child of Eden's messy unfolding is far more indicative of organic life. Things sprawl around you like some crazy collage, not like the well-organised components of a machine.

When I started writing this post, I was planning on examining why I don't think Child of Eden is as good as Rez, but I think now a far more interesting observation is how the two games themselves intertwine and relate in similar ways as technological and organic life do within each game. I undoubtedly enjoyed Child of Eden less than Rez, and one of the first things I did after playing Child of Eden for a few hours was go back and play Rez again. Yet what is more interesting here than just saying Child of Eden is 'not good' is how different each game felt despite being nearly identical as far as mechanics go. Child of Eden is not so much a bad Rez as an anti-Rez. It does not have the same clear progression and tidiness as Rez because organic life is never clear nor tidy. If Child of Eden is a worse game than Rez, it is only because it sticks so determinedly and consistently to its central themes.

Such is life, I guess.

Anti-Game: The Minimalist Style, Elegant Puzzles, and Mindfucked Space of Hazard

2011-05-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

Speaking as part of IGDA Brisbane’s Game On lecture series, Melbourne-based independent games developer Alexander Bruce presented a talk on his current project, the mind-boggling, space-twisting, eyeball-burning Hazard: The Journey of Life. He discussed the game’s history, going back to 2006 and the many iterations that led from a failed Snake clone, to a multiplayer arena combat game, to a single player puzzle game, to the space-warping experience it is today. It was an interesting insight into how such a bizarre game comes into being along with many interesting asides into broader design concepts. There was a video camera present so hopefully a video of the entire talk appears somewhere on the internet in the near future for me to link too [EDIT: Here it is]. In the meantime, though, I’ll try to do sections of the talk justice with this post by focusing on the historical section of Bruce’s talk which explored how he settled on the game’s unique aesthetic style, its puzzle design, and its unique depiction of space, and how the three aspects all intertwine.

The Journey of The Journey of Life

Hazard is a difficult game to describe in words. Even watching a trailer can hardly impress the nauseating sensation that is playing it. Space—or perhaps more specifically how you navigate space—does not work in Hazard like it does in most games or, indeed, like reality. Movement is untrustworthy. You may be standing on the third floor of a tower, looking up and down through a central hole at the other floors above and below you. Meanwhile, in the room to your left is the second floor of the tower, to your right is the fourth floor, simultaneously below you and beside you. Or perhaps you stand before a forked stairwell—red stairs going up, blue stairs going down; take the wrong path and, somehow, you are back before both stairwells again.

The earliest roots of Hazard came into being in 2006 when Bruce started to look at geometry and space. Curiously, this came about when he tried to make a clone of Snake… badly.

“I was trying to create Snake, and I implemented it in a very stupid way.”

Bruce was still learning how to program and didn’t want to have to figure out how to build the game from scratch in Java but neither did he want to “cheat” by using a tutorial. As he had just completed a mod on the Unreal engine, he decided to use the Unreal engine to make his Snake game.

He used what he described as a “brute force method”. He created a floorboard of elevators that would open and close behind the player, leaving a trailing gap in the player's wake. The further the player would get, the longer the trail of depressed elevators would get. “But,” said Bruce. “My game of Snake was fairly flawed as my character could jump and had a gun.”

Rather than remove these elements, Bruce gave up on creating a Snake clone and grew more curious in how these elements would work with his floorboard design. What would happen if he shot the elevators, for instance? “Maybe I could start linking them together so I shoot one and create a rippling effect.”

This led to an abstract combat arena game where players would shoot the tiles that made up levels to cause domino effects that would knock opponents out of the arena. Bruce showed videos of outer-space arenas, constructed out of neon green bathroom tiles shattering in mesmeric displays before binding back together.

Eventually, though, Bruce had to put this project aside as his AI was not performing adequately, and his “brute force” coding made multiplayer next to impossible to run over a network. Instead, he moved on to other prototypes including what he called “recursive space”. Bruce described it as “like Asteroid, where you go off one side and back on the other. I wanted to see what this would look like in 3D.”

The video Bruce showed this time was of an Unreal Tournament-esque map, except with the effect of being enclosed in a cube of mirrors. Copies of the same map stretched ad infinitum above and below the level. The player could fall and land on the roof of the same map, or fire a rocket launcher and be hit in the back by the rocket.

Then, in early 2009, he decided it was time to begin work on something bigger than a prototype. “Of all the things I’d created thus far,” said Bruce. “I was most interesting in trying to do something with my geometry system.” Since multiplayer wasn’t working, he shifted his focus onto a single-player puzzle game.

As with his experimental, abstract prototypes, Bruce explained how “for the most part, all of the good ideas I got for this game came from my mindset of actively working against the grain, because that is what I do best.” This meant trying to create what he described as “the anti-game”, which “flew in the face of whatever anyone else said was good design.” Bruce’s reasoning for this what that he knew that whatever he ended up creating would be different. “If somehow I could make that good enough then I would be onto something special because people hadn’t seen it before.”

Visual Design

The Unfinished Swan

What was to become a key feature of Bruce’s anti-game was the art style. Hazard’s world is predominately a flat white with a thin, black outline, and an occasional flash of bright colour or intricate pattern. It is fairly hard to mistake it for any other game.

Bruce recollected how at E3, 2010, a person observing Hazard said that the distinct, minimalist art direction was “obviously a budget decision.” At E3, where every other game was mapped in high-quality (and predominately grey) textures, Bruce could see how someone could think that. However, “what the person didn’t realise when he made that comment was that despite looking like an unfinished colouring book, he had been standing there watching it for fifteen minutes. Everything around him was louder, in booths that were flashier, on screens that were bigger, by companies that were better, but for fifteen minutes at E3 he couldn’t stop watching this little indie game made of lines and colours.”

For Bruce, the observer’s actions meant more than his words, especially in contrast to other accolades the game received, such as people calling it “the most creative thing at E3. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident,” stated Bruce.

Bruce explained that “in the world of 3D, low budget games stand out as bad because they aren’t keeping up with technical advances. People can tell when something is limited by hardware constraints.” So how was his game able to be compelling? When one can’t compete on technological grounds, one must make up for it with style. “I needed to come up with something that no one else was doing,” Bruce said.

Bruce then showed two games that heavily inspired his own unique visual style. At first, he showed still images of the games as he described them. Curiously, one was simply a blank white screen, and the other was pitch black.

Eventually, he revealed that the white game was Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan—a first-person game in a pure white world where the player must throw blobs of paint to gauge the shape and depth of the world. Through The Unfinished Swan, Bruce explained “the simplest things we take for granted in games suddenly becomes wonderful again. Simply exploring an environment is magical.”

The black game was Wraughk Audio Design’s Deep Sea—a game that literally has no graphics. The player wears a sense deprivation mask that blinds them, affects their breathing, and works with sound to give the sense of being submerged deep underwater.

Bruce explained that “the design of both these games is interesting, but magnified by the graphical style chosen (or not chosen).” Once Hazard had a similarly extreme graphical style, “it suddenly seemed remarkable again” when compared to other Unreal games.

A side effect of this visual design, Bruce explained, was how it effected the puzzles design of the game—it made the environments readable.

Puzzle Design

Bruce highlighted Portal as a game that uses readable environments well. In Portal, it is clear where you can and can’t put a puzzle. “The minimalist aesthetic got out of the way of the puzzle design and allowed for elegance, not complexity.”

Similarly, Bruce was able to use details and colours to attract the player’s attention in his otherwise white world. “Much like The Unfinished Swan, I could create a game where the emphasis was on discovery.

Bruce contrasted how this was executed perfectly in Portal with how he feels it doesn’t work so well in Portal 2, and in the process managed to find the words to describe the sequel’s shortcomings that I had struggled with myself.

“Every room in Portal 2 feels epic. They contain massive spaces, moving parts, and far more detail than was ever seen in the original game, and as much as all that sounds like a step in the right direction, for me it felt like it flew in the face of their original design. To add all these extra details, they removed the freedom to place portals absolutely anywhere in the game. Many puzzles went from ‘where can I put a portal to solve this puzzle correctly?’ to ‘where can I put a portal at all?’”

While Portal allowed a vast array of choice, Portal 2 restricted freedom: “Every chamber in Portal had room for the original solution, an advanced solution, solving it with the fewest portals, the least number of steps, or the least amount of time. In other words, the rooms were flexible enough to allow many different play styles.” However, in Portal 2, argued Bruce, the only options were success, death, getting stuck, or quitting.

“Limiting the design like this was a real shame as the first game got it all so right.”

(Personally, I wondered if this is why I enjoyed the level design of Portal 2’s co-op campaign far more than the single player, as it more closely resembled the first Portal.)

For Bruce, then, Portal—as shown in the contrast with Portal 2—is a fine example of elegant design, that less is more.

Bruce explained how when he first began designing his puzzles, he too fell in the trap of trying to make everything epic and complex. Though, he soon came to realise that creating a game like that isn’t fun for the player and perhaps not even for the designer.

“The more time I spent thinking about puzzles, the more I realised that truly great design was found when the designer could show you the fewest elements but figuring out how to integrates them all together was the real problem to solve.”

He used Braid to demonstrate this point. Every world in Braid begins with a simple level: obtain the key from the pit and unlock the door. In each world, the player must use the unique ability of that world to get the key, thus learning how that ability worked before moving on to more challenging levels. Bruce explained that, “If I was to give you a single lock and key, but there was something unusual in how they work together, that creates a far better puzzle than me giving you a lock and a hundred keys and saying ‘figure out which one opens it.’”

Bruce stressed that when designing a game that the player isn’t familiar with, “you need to get as much out of the way of the player’s enjoyment as possible.”

To drive the point home, Bruce showed a video of Polytron's upcoming 3D/2D hybrid game, Fez. “Fez is a game that would lend itself to being one of the most frustrating and confusing things ever if executed incorrectly. It would be very easy to overload the design with things like enemies, time pressures, and stress, and lose sight of what makes it special in the first place.”

Twisted Space

So Bruce now had his single player puzzle game with elegantly designed puzzles and a minimalist, eye-catching art style, but something was still missing. While playtesting the game, players were regularly getting stuck or lost, suggesting to Bruce that he removed dead-ends, or made the game more linear, or add clealer way pointing. But Bruce was wary of following the feedback too literally. He quoted Team Meat to say, “Players can only tell you what they are used to.” Or, as he put it more bluntly: “Players don’t know what they want.”

For Bruce, that people got stuck on puzzle 40 did not mean there was an issue with puzzle 40, but perhaps there was an issue with how puzzle 38 was communicating the skills that puzzle 40 required.

He boiled down all the negative feedback he was receiving down to the fact that “it wasn’t that people wanted more, or that there were dead ends everywhere, but rather because of the way the game was structured, in a few key points of the game, I was teaching players a piece of information at one point and it was too much of a leap for them to apply that at another point.”

The only way Bruce could solve this would be too significantly reconstruct the game so that some puzzles could be physically linked differently. However, this was impossible without skewing the design that Bruce envisioned for the game. Instead, he tried something else: “Enter Mind Fuck.”

“One of the most important decisions that happened when designing the game happened by not doing what everyone was suggesting,” Bruce said.

“What saved me in this case was doing something that no one ever suggested because it was weird and other games didn’t do it. Something I nearly cut from the game entirely. The answer to making the game special was breaking space. If I could make a maze that keeps throwing players back to the start of it, then it wasn’t too much of a leap to arbitrarily connect one puzzle to another.”

By twisting space, Bruce was able to open up the game to different play styles while also preventing players from getting stuck. Much like Braid, with its reversal of time, failure is never an end in Hazard, but will just send the player somewhere else.

“The game gets out of the player’s way and lets them enjoy the space.”

The feedback from playtesting was instantly different, said Bruce. “Rather than being caught up on guidance, or knowing what they could or could not solve, players just kept running through the game, solving problems in what seemed like a coherent order. It didn’t always make sense, but they didn’t care because the game kept moving.”

Finally, Bruce explained how while Hazard certainly has its thematic content of psychology threaded through its aesthetics and design, it neither has or requires a story. He feels like people miss the point when they ask if it should have a story. “Rather than letting players run around where half of the fun was trying to figure out why it existed, or what it was, if I added a story that explained all of this stuff, they would know they were just going through the motions to get to some contrived plot twist.”

Bruce put it most succinctly, I think, when he said that Hazard is about discovery for discovery’s sake. Just like The Unfinished Swan, exploring and comprehending the world through its aesthetics, its design, and its twisting of space is its own reward.

A Draft of a Thesis Abstract

2011-04-11T03:49:00.000-07:00

[This year I am completing a Communication and Cultural Studies Honours as both a capstone of my undergraduate studies and, most probably, a stepping stone into several more years of postgraduate study. In addition to some coursework, Honours largely consists of writing a 15,000 word dissertation by the end of Semester 2 (late October). As such, I will be doing less freelance writing and even less blogging this year as I work on my thesis. However, to make up for this, I might try to update here with my thesis-in-progress, both to keep the blog alive and to get some valuable feedback. While the academics in my school (in particularly my supervisor) are able to give me excellent structural and theoretical advice, few of them play videogames and even fewer engage with videogame academia. By placing my work-in-progress here, perhaps my arguments will become a little more watertight.

For now, here is an early draft of an abstract of my thesis. It gives a decent oversight about what I plan to write about this year. Needless to say, there is a very high chance that this will change in the coming months as I do more research, get more feedback, and actually start writing. But for now, this is my topic as it currently stands:]

Partners in Crime: The Mediating Effects of the Playable Character on the Videogame Player

Through a textual analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North 2007), this thesis aims to complicate and complement videogame studies’ current understanding of the playable character’s role in shaping the player’s experience. Just as the player may define certain actions and characteristics of the character, so too do the character’s actions and characteristics helps to shape the player’s experience.

The videogame player interacts with the videogame text as a hybrid of navigable spaces: a procedural space defined by processes that the player must comprehend; a possibility space defined by affordances that the player must act within the confines of; a fictional space defined as an audiovisual world that the player must interpret and exist in. While most videogame scholars acknowledge the role of the playable character as a vessel through which the player navigates these spaces, rarely is its mediating effect on the player fully recognised. Many texts will use the terms ‘player’ and ‘character’ interchangeably when discussing the agent that acts within the videogame space. This uncertainty as to just who is acting highlights a gap in the existing literature on playable characters and their role in mediating the player’s experience.

Engaging with actor-network theory and cyborg theory to account for the existence of the playable character’s nonhuman agency independent of the player, this thesis explores how the agencies of both actors—player and character—intertwine and mediate each other to form a hybrid actor, the player-character, which is the actual actor that navigates the videogame space.

Grand Theft Auto IV and its episodic expansions “The Lost and the Damned” and “The Ballad of Gay Tony” engage the player with three distinct playable characters while the game’s spaces and mechanics remain more-or-less unchanged. An analysis of these titles will thus allow this thesis to explore the effects of the playable character’s agency on the player-character hybrid and, subsequently, on the player’s experience.

New Kill Screen Article: A Sackboy Says No Words

2011-03-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

Awesome art thanks to Josh Holinaty

The second article I have written for Kill Screen Magazine's website is up now. It looks at LittleBigPlanet and how communication because an intrinsic activity between characters, as opposed to a solely extrinsic activity between players. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Just like last time, many thanks to Ryan Kuo for the awesome editing job. Without his suggestions, I wouldn't be half as happy with this post as I am.

The Inevitable Exploitation of Chain World

2011-03-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

Today (or possibly yesterday; I am a bit behind on Internet News), Jason Rohrer's entry into this year's GDC's Game Design Contest, Chain World, went up on eBay.

Some quick background information: The theme for this year's contest was 'religion'. That is, the contestants were not to make a game about religion, but a game that could be a religion. Returning champion Jenova Chen created the most disappointing concept, essentially sticking TED talk videos on YouTube with a little bit of gameification. John Romero had an interesting idea for a live-action game that he was able to perform in the room. It was a very western-centric idea of religion, but it worked and was fairly interesting. If I ever get the chance to write up about the actual session, I would like to cover Romero's concept in more detail.

The winning concept, and my personal favourite, however, was Jason Rohrer's. Rohrer's concept was based on his personal feelings of what religion is. In an over-simplified nutshell: religion is the myths we tell ourselves about those that came before us. He used examples such as things his family always say his grandfather used to say (though none of them are actually sure) and the stories and beliefs we form around artifacts such as Stonehenge. Essentially, we craft narratives and reasons around the things we don't know the actual history for.

Rohrer conceptualised this with a modification of Minecraft. One player has one life, and when they die they pass the game on to someone else on a USB stick. Once you play the game, you may never play it again. It was an interesting and inspired concept, and the most grounded in an actual interesting idea of religion. At the talk, Rohrer passed the USB stick onto the second player (himself being the first), and from there the game would continue as player passed it on to player.

Except now, player number two is exploiting it. He is selling the USB on eBay to the highest bidder. I could write a huge rant about how pathetic and despicable I think this is, but as my opinions seem to mirror Darius Kazemi's, I'll just link to his brief thoughts on it. You should read it before carrying on with this piece, just so you know where I stand on the matter.

So yes, the fact that this is happening made me angry. However, unlike several people I have been debating with on Twitter, I don't believe this necessarily implies the game was poorly designed to begin with. On the contrary, I think this exploitation crowns the game an absolute success. Chain World didn't fail. It is we, humans, that failed.

The reasons why others seem to think this exploitation of Chain World implies poor design (and I am not naming these 'others' on the high possibility that I am misquoting them and deforming their arguments, as Twitter is prone to do) can be boiled down to two things: firstly, the game fundamentally relied on players passing the game on, which was a tenuous hope at best; secondly, Rohrer never anticipated the game to be played this way and thus the game fails at achieving the thematic goals intended by its creator.

I agree with both of these statements completely, and I absolutely hate what the current player is doing with the game, yet I still do not believe Chain World failed. Why? Because Chain World is currently being used in the same way religion is used: exploited by the few to obtain money and fame from the many.

No religion starts as an institution. Religion start as faith and belief. It is only when they gather enough popularity that those in charge start exploiting and cashing in on the faith of the many. This isn't a particularly shocking thing to say. You only have to look at the wealth piled up in the Vatican while the preachers of Christianity insist we should give everything to the poor to see it is true. Does this mean religion is essentially 'bad'? No, of course not. Everyone is free to believe in whatever they desire, and nearly all religions are founded on noble, commendable goals. It's the institutionalisation of this faith and the exploitation of the faith of the many by a few that is bad--but also, I would argue, inevitable.

Those who founded Christianity did not do so to gather a huge pile of gold and tell others what to do. They founded it because they thought it was a pretty decent way to live your life and they thought everyone else would gain something from it, too. And then comes the inevitable stage where those in charge find themselves in a position of power over the faith of the many. Sure, it's greedy, but it's human. And I don't mean to pick on Christianity; the same happens in all the world's major religions at some point in history or another.

Now back to Chain World. It started with a belief of Rohrer of what religion 'is' and how that should be conveyed as a game. This belief tapped into similar beliefs of many others, either because he gave a really good presentation (which he did); or because most of those people love Minecraft, or Rohrer's previous work, or both.

And now, those shared beliefs of the many are being exploited by a few. Just like the most popular religions, Chain World is being institutionalised. Chain World is being treated just like a religion.

So was Chain World poorly designed because a) it is no longer conveying the themes Rohrer intended (or arguably it never conveyed those themes as the very first player after Rohrer exploited it), and b) because there was no fail-safe in the game design to prevent this from happening? No. Chain World was exquisitely designed, perhaps even better than Rohrer intended, because it has been able to evolve in the same way major religions tend to evolve: from personal beliefs into the exploitation of many, far beyond the control of the religion's founder.

So while I think what the current player is doing is pathetic, I also think it was inevitable, and perhaps even necessary if Chain World was to succeed at the contests stated thematic goal: make a game that could be a religion. As the bids for Chain World on eBay approach $500, and as Rohrer futilely urges on Twitter that the believers reject this reappropriation and exploitation of his creation*, those currently in power are taking suggestions for a tenth commandment for the game (essentially, putting their own rules over Rohrer's) as they institutionalise Chain World into the religion it had no chance of not becoming.

Chain World succeeded. Humans, on the other hand, have not.

(* Interestingly, I could be reappropriating Rohrer's words in a similar way myself by saying this is what he meant in this tweet, which he quite possibly didn't!)

(** Also, for the sake of full disclosure, and if it wasn't clear from the post, I am an agnostic/athiest (it depends what day you ask me). I apologise if my cynical views on religion offend you and your faith as I mean no disrespect to anyone's personal beliefs.)

God-Damned Crazy: GDC Postmortem

2011-03-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

After a ridiculous long long trip home (over 30 hours spent on planes, trains, and in airports), I am back in Brisbane after what was easily the most phenomenally insane and overwhelming and outright amazing week of my life attending the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Lectures were attended, reports were written, hotel rooms were partied in, tacos were eaten. It was one hell of a week.

I won't go too far into my experience partly because I am so jetlagged and mostly because that is a piece I am meant to be writing for Pixel Hunt, so I will surely link that when it is done.

Speaking of links, I was planning on linking to all the reports I wrote for Industry Gamers throughout the week, but they are currently migrating to a new server so I can't get to my articles, I am afraid. Instead, here are my favourite three things to come out of last week:

The Many Faces of Tim Schafer, Paste Magazine. Double Fine's Tim Schafer hosted this year's Game Developer Choice Awards and did a stellar job. He was entertaining, funny, and even managed to slam Penny Arcade over the whole Dickwolf thing. It was incredible. Unrelated to all of this, Brian Taylor took a lot of photos of Schafer's head during the ceremony and they turned out awesome.
Kill Screen & Copenhagen Gaming Collective Party. The social highlight of the week for me was partying with the amazing writers from Kill Screen Magazine (and a whole bunch of other people!) Games were played, dances were danced, and a certain Sydney-based blogger got a bit drunk and hugged a lot of people. Brian Taylor, once again, grabbed a whole stack of amazing photos worth checking out.
Holding the Bag: How I Gamed GDC's Top Social Game Developers. The Social Game Developer's Rant/Debate was a chaotic highlight of the conference. Strong opinions were thrown back and forward. An experiment/game was run where people had to collect coins to win. One man took things into his own hands and stole the entire bag. He has since written up his own account of the thievery and has drawn some interesting comparisons with social gaming and the gaming industry in general. It is well worth a read.

I am sure there is more incredbile stuff out there that I have not had time to read yet, so please link to whatever you wish in the comments.

I am utterly humbled to have met so many amazing developers and writers this past week and I can't wait to see you all again next year.

Two Tiny Wings And One Big Heart

2011-02-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

Andreas Illiger's adorable Tiny Wings soared onto the iOS app store this week. Quite suddenly, half my Twitter feed was talking about this charming new Canabalt-esque game (‘Canabalt-esque now being pretty much its own genre). Between downloading the game, playing two rounds, and going back to the app store to give the game a five-star rating, over a hundred new reviews appeared. And what good reviews, too! Players say they love it, that is it beautiful. The compliments are vague and abstract (though, looking back several hours later, the number of reviews has quadrupled and there are more specific comments now, both complimentary and critical), but they mirror my own feeling on the game perfectly: Tiny Wings is lovely, and it makes you feel good.

The premise is that you are a bird who will never be able to fly because your wings are too tiny. But this doesn’t stop our little disproportionate hero from trying anyway. He wants to fly, and he will do it however he can. With a touch on the iPhone’s screen, the bird folds his wings back to plummet towards the ground and speed down hills; when you release, he soars off the incline of the next hill like a stunt jump, flapping frantically. The key is to time your drops to get the most speed and height for the next jump. If you do it right, you might even touch the clouds.

It’s a fun and addictive experience, much like that of Canabalt—as simple as it is complex. But also like Canabalt, the true beauty and depth lies not just in the mechanics, but in the game’s fiction. The character, the visuals, the animations, and the music all come together to make Tiny Wings about a disadvantaged bird who got the arse-end of life but refuses to give up on his dreams. Tiny Wings makes you want to grin and cry at the same time. Ultimately, it just feels good.

‘Good’ in the way the ending of Cool Runnings feels good (at the very least, how Cool Runnings felt good after a few vodkas the last time it was on TV). Just like the Jamaican Bobsled Team, the tiny bird tries so hard and overcomes so many challenges, but can never quite reach his goal—at least not for good. It’s both heart-warmingly uplifting and tear-jerkingly sad to watch your bird launch into the clouds—so happy he has touched his dreams; so sad that it will be so fleeting as he falls back to earth. But the moment he lands he is eager to try again and again and again.

The music, an uplifting twang of guitars and blare of trumpets that wouldn’t be out-of-place on a Polyphonic Spree album, complements the themes beautifully. If the bird’s whimsical cry of joy when he launches into the sky doesn’t make you smile, the music will.

Tiny Wings is a fun game. It is mechanically competent and has an excellent, simple-yet-deep scoring system that tempts you to play over and over again, as all games in the Canabalt genre should. But while these elements alone would make Tiny Wings a great game, it is the emotional investment enabled by the game’s aesthetic design coupled with these mechanics that make it truly remarkable. That little bird never stops trying to reach his dreams, even if he can only realise them for a second at a time.

Thieves, Poachers, Pokemon, and Me.

2011-02-04T05:05:00.000-08:00

(Anyone got a reference for this picture?)

[A note: I imagine that many of the events I talk about in this post from HeartGold also occurred in Gold and Silver. Though, as I have not played the original Generation II games, this is the first time I have encountered them.]

After battling through half a dozen trainers just south of Violet City, I’m relieved to see the Pokecentre at the entrance to Dark Cave. It seems like a fairly odd, out-of-the-way place for a Pokecentre, but I’m not complaining; I’m only a few hours into my adventure on HeartGold, and my pokemon can hardly survive three consecutive battles in a row without fainting. It would be nice to give my pokemon a rest before venturing on.

A slightly overweight man is standing around outside by himself. I have a quick word to him as I pass.
“Pssst! Wanna buy a Slowpoke tail?”

A Slowpoke… tail? As in, the tail of a Slowpoke? As in, you removed a limb from a pokemon, and now you are trying to sell it to me?

Half-confused, half-shocked, I speak to the man again to make sure I heard correctly. Sure enough, I had. Adding to the absurdity of this interaction, when I tell him that I indeed do not want any Slowpoke tail, he tells me to ‘scram’—a jarringly rude remark in a world as polite and cheerful as that of pokemon. I enter the Pokecentre, still unsure as to what just happened.

Pokemon games, more than the average videogame, have always had to fend off baseless accusations from those trying to protect the defenceless minds of gullible, influential children. Pokemon promotes violence; Pokemon promotes gambling; Pokemon is nothing but an empty marketing scheme that exists solely to separate children from their pocket money. Most of these accusations are hyperbolic or rely on an annecdotal case study of a single child. They also completely disregard the many benefits of Pokemon, such as motivating kids to learn how to read from a young age, basic maths and logic, problem solving skills, and the general themes of cooperation and sharing that permeates the series.
In generally, the population of Pokemon’s worlds reflect all the good things we want children to think about the real-world: people are polite, selfless, and generous; animals are cute, friendly and obedient; everybody lives comfortably and within their means; and, uh, Dad is never home. So being told to ‘scram’ by someone who offered to sell me the limb of a pokemon was nothing short of shocking.

Which leads me to the one accusation often levelled at Pokemon games that seems to have a bit more friction: Pokemon promotes animal cruelty. While still exaggerated beyond all fairness, it is hard to ignore that the supposedly symbiotic relationship between mankind and pokemon seems to be defined as “man forcibly removes pokemon from natural habitat; man imprisons pokemon; man forces pokemon to battle other pokemon and to complete tasks solely for man’s benefit.”

It’s a problem at the core of the series’ design and fiction, yet one the series has gotten away with ignoring for nearly two decades by concealing it in layers of positive themes, cute creatures, and content people. Everybody—man and pokemon alike—is happy, so what’s the problem?

Which made my encounter with the shady man outside the Pokecentre so much more jarring. In a world where international terrorism seems to be equivalent to real-world juvenile delinquency, being offered illegally poached goods and then told to scram was not something I was ever expecting to happen.

More than any previous Pokemon titles I have played, then, HeartGold seems willing to accept that the relationship between man and pokemon is not one of perfectly balanced symbiosis. While man and pokemon are indeed able to live happier lives through cooperation, man is also able to live a far easier and profitable life through taking advantage of pokemon.

(By http://goodcitizen.deviantart.com)

Previous titles have ignored this imbalance or, at the very least, it has been held back by the typically well-natured people that populate the games. But HeartGold tackles it from the very beginning. In the opening sequence where you choose your first pokemon, the typical trope is that you choose pokemon X, and your friend chooses pokemon Y (where X is weak against Y). HeartGold usurps this with a slightly different formula: “You choose X, your friend has already chosen Z, and someone else steals Y.”

Steals! A young pokemon is stolen and forced to battle by an evil-hearted trainer! Professor Elm tells the player directly his concerns for the wellbeing of that pokemon: if the owner is evil, the pokemon will more likely than not grow up to become evil-hearted themselves. What a horrible fate for a living creature, to be raised in such a way that your fundamental outlook on the world is one of evil and corruption.

That someone could steal a pokemon and force it to act a certain way hints, from very early in the game, that the relationship between man and pokemon is not as simple and balanced as previous games would like to think. Rather, mankind has a significant responsibility to the relationship and is just as capable of taking advantage of the creatures as they are of cooperating with them.

Things quieten down for a time and my initial shock at the idea of a pokemon being stolen fades. But then I encountered the rude, obese Slowpoke tail smuggler. The plot thickens in the next town where it becomes apparent that Team Rocket had been rounding up Slowpokes and chopping off their tails to sell on the black market. The tails grow back over time, but how horrid!

And that is as far as my journey into HeartGold has currently progressed. I have a long way to go, but just from these opening hours, I sense a maturity to the series I have not previously encountered (though, I again acknowledge that I have not played the original Gold and Silver versions and the same themes were probably approached in those games, I imagine). In these encounters with the darker members of humanity there is a a heightened self-awareness that challenges not only the player to think in more complicated terms about their relationship to their pokemon, but challenges the series itself to re-evaluate the mechanics at its very core—not so much in the sense that the mechanics are morally questionable, but that they are just more morally complicated than previously assumed.

While the thief steals a pokemon to use for evil, you, on the other hand, now have the option to keep one of your pokemon outside of their pokeball. It isn’t much, but it is a step in the opposite direction to show how man and pokemon can be true companions, rather than the latter being the tool of the former.

My relationship with my pokemon has always been “I tell my pokemon to do something, and they do it; everyone is happy.” However, The pokemon thief, the smuggler, and the poaching of slowpokes by Team Rocket show that this relationship is too simplistic. I must consciously treat my pokemon well or consciously take advantage of them. There is no unconscious middle ground. It is something previous titles have tried to urge in the cutesy, throwaway dialogue, but I’ve never had the imperative to take it seriously. Why put an effort into treating my pokemon well when the alternative is, well, when there is no alternative? But this time, in a iteration of the Pokemon universe where humans exist that intentionally abuse pokemon, my pokemon and their quality of life are completely, utterly my responsibility.

Crossing King Carrion at Kill Screen Magazine

2011-01-06T01:21:00.000-08:00

How awesome is this art?!

I have a new article up over at Kill Screen's excellent new website. It discusses ideas of progression and difficulty and being 'stuck' in Super Meat Boy and how it helps the player to deal with this in the player's chase for perfection. Or something like that. Thanks to some great editors, I'm really happy with how this has turned out so please head over there and have a read.

Some Thoughts on 2010: Part Four

2011-01-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

And with five more games, so ends my 2010 retrospective. You can check out the games I have already talked about in part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Dragon Quest IX

This was my first ever Dragon Quest title, and I had high hopes. I've heard much about the series generally and even more about this game specifically. Certainly, it is the first JRPG I have really enjoyed since Final Fantasy IX, and is also exactly the kind of title I have wanted for my DS for years--namely, a game that is as enjoyable to play for five minutes as it is for fifty.

While the Final Fantasy series seems intent on distancing itself from its roots as much as possible (I have no interest in Final Fantasy XIII whatsoever), Dragon Quest IX is a delightful re-imagining of SNES-era JRPGs with modern sensibilities. The dialogue is alarmingly well-written and full of self-aware humour and bad (i.e. awesome) puns. It takes itself serious enough and constantly throws interesting dilemmas at the player while also constantly lampooning JRPG tropes and cliches.

The story is passable but forgettable, and exists only to prop up the question, yet it does so aptly. Battles are quick and enjoyable and, thankfully, allows you to quickly change between AI settings or switch to full manual control. I hate turn-based games that don't let me control all my people. Dragon Quest IX's AI settings are usually okay, but it is good to be able to switch them off mid boss battle when need be.

Character customisation adds a lot, too. Being able to see every single piece of armour and weaponry on each of your characters adds just enough motivation to buy that new bandanna. I surprised myself by actually considering less-strong shoes for one character just because they matched the rest of her outfit.

I've only just recently tried out the much talked about multiplayer. It is enjoyable enough, though being in another player's world just feels... fruitless. However, pretending you are an AI companion for that player is kind of fun.

I only recall reading one Dragon Quest IX related article this year, and that was a spotlighted blog at Destructoid about how the game deals with the theme of faith.

WarioWare D.I.Y

Contender for best game manual of the year. In the same year that Ubisoft said it would stop supplying printed manuals with games (it was Ubisoft, right?), WarioWare D.I.Y came with a beautiful, thick little book with fold out covers that I sat down to read cover to cover in the vain hope that if I actually read it, game designers would create more manuals like this.

I am not much of a creator of content in games. In LittleBigPlanet, ModNation Racers, Minecraft, I spend very little time actually creating and much more time marveling at the things others create. Yet, in WarioWare D.I.Y, I found it incredibly simple to create fun mini-games of startling variety that just fit into the games existing style without much polish. It takes effort to make a working LittleBigPlanet level to look 'good', but not so in WarioWare D.I.Y.

Similar to the stunning manuals, if you are patient enough to sit through them, the tutorials are practically beginners lessons at object-orientated programming. Even a kid could sit through these and at the end understand the difference between a FOR... DO loop and a WHILE... DO loop. If you have a kid you think would enjoy programming, this is a pretty decent place to start.

Yet I feel it went under the radar a bit. Perhaps if it allowed more complex controls than just tapping, and if it came with more prepackaged games it would have fared better. That said, it has the easiest to use online service of any DS game I've played... but that isn't saying much. If only the DS had a better integrated friend system to help spread games more, I would probably have spent many more hours on this game. At present, it is on the top of my "must return to soon" pile.

BIT.TRIP BEAT

I first grabbed this game on my iphone, but didn't fully appreciate it until I grabbed it for my macbook in the recent Steam sale. BIT.TRIP BEAT (I am under the impression that the capitals are required) is a torturous, indie reinterpretation of ball-and-board games such as Breakout and Pong. It is an entertaining experience, but it is hard to call the game 'fun'. BIT.TRIP BEAT hurts. It makes you dizzy, it makes you motion-sick, it makes your eyes feel like they are bleeding. The visuals are psychedelic and go out of their way to make things difficult for you. Your targets are logic-defying and mindboggling, and the difficulty curve is steeper than the walls of your house.

Yet, I keep returning to it. This game is certainly not for everyone. Hell, this game might not be for anyone. But despite the fact I can't defeat the second level, I still want to keep playing it. Though, I no longer try the iphone version. I almost vomited on the bus one too many times.

Metro 2033

The gunplay in Metro 2033 is nothing special. The mutant enemies are arbitrary and forgettable at best and rage-inducing at worst. Towards the end these green blob... things made me rage quite more than once and nearly prevented me from finishing the game.

But the sense of atmosphere the game invokes is unprecedented. Walking around the train stations of Moscow's post-apocalyptic Metro, the world and its people felt real. Their day-to-day problems felt real, and I felt like a part of them. A lot of the worldbuilding is probably owing to the novel, but it pays off excellently. When the gameplay falls through, the fiction keeps you going.

The atmosphere is not just in the towns, however. The sense of cold and the sense of that bare, stubborn struggle of survival are so visceral. From saving individual bullets to wheezing through a spoiled oxygen mask filter instead of wasting a new one, it just felt so... real.

Playing a game in Russian certainly added something, also. It just felt right. I think it is a silly and demeaning analogy to say it felt like playing gaming's version of watching a world movie, but that is what it made me want. Metro 2033 made me hungry for more international games than the typical English and Japanese ones I have access to in this country.

I can't recall reading much about Metro 2033, but I'm sure things were written. Please leave me links to any pieces you remember reading.

iPhone Games

My initial list for these posts had about twenty more games in it, but instead I thought I could put them all under this heading. I stress, though, that that is not because all these games together are only as important to me as one other 'real' game. It is simply because I cannot afford the time to write about twenty more games.

I have purchased (or downloaded for free) fifty-two iPhone games since purchasing my iPhone in February 2010. In that time I have played many games that I have thoroughly enjoyed and still often return to at the bus stop, on my lunch break, or just lying in bed. I hold these games largely responsible for the little playtime my DS has received.

Top games include Angry Birds, or course, but also Adam Saltsman's Canabalt and Gravity Hook work perfectly with the touch controls. Solipskier is another great title, requiring you to just keep your finger on the screen. Osmos works beautifully with the touch controls (far better than its PC counterpart), and Spider uses the iPhone's unique abilities superbly to create a very interesting and fresh platformer that also tells a spatial narrative. Meanwhile Tractor Beam is an interesting take on Asteroid which uses physics in some very interesting ways.

All these games are great games because they would not (or do not) work on other platforms. Too many big publishers try to release ports of big console releases on iPhone for $10 that play horribly, yet the indies and the smaller companies have understood that there still exists so much potential in simplistic, minimalist controls, and these are the games that have made the iPhone such a great gaming platform.

That said my most-played and most enjoyed iPhone game was, surprisingly, one using on-screen controls. Pix'n Love Rush is a great little platformer that I have trouble explaining why I enjoy. Each level is mere seconds long, and you complete a five minute game by perfecting as many of these levels as possible, racking up your multiplier as you go. The visuals are delightfully retro (of course) and there are many nods to previous generations of games, as well as a great chiptune soundtrack. Perhaps it is the retro indie platformer obsessive in me, perhaps it is my love of score-chasing, but Pix'n Love Rush just struck a nerve in me and I found it very hard to stop playing. I even wrote a little reader review for Kotaku about it!

And those are the games I played in 2010. How about you? Any particularly interesting ones that tickled your brain that I didn't cover? Any articles I should have linked to but didn't? Let me know! And thanks for actually reading all these. It's been a pleasure to relive all these games, and now I am tempted to start new games on all of them!

Some Thoughts on 2010: Part Three

2011-01-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

The past two days I have posted Part One and Two of my 2010 retrospective where I have just written a few paragraphs on the games that shaped my past year. In Part Three I finally move on to some Playstation 3 games and, shock horror, some 2D indie platformers.

ModNation Racers

The most frustrating release of 2010. At its core is a devilishly fun kart game with interesting weapons and balanced design that can easily give Mario Kart a run for its money. Yet, around this core are layers upon layers of horrible user-interface design and slow loading times, as though the designers just didn't want anyone to play it.

A patch was released, but it fixed very little. I will probably never play this game again, which would be sad enough if the kart-racing at the game's heart was no so fun. I don't recall reading much about the game, but I did write a rather lengthy rant myself.

Limbo

Yet another indie platformer, yet another much-talked-about, opinion-splitting game. I would like to say Limbo transfixed me enough for me to finish it on one sitting, as it did for many others, but one puzzle towards the end had me beat for several days. In fact, I ended up having to ask my brother how to beat it. Many had issues with the game's unforgiving, exploitative design, but I solely blame myself for not being able to defeat this certain level.

Limbo nailed so much perfectly. The mood, the atmosphere, the minimal soundtrack, the puzzles. Underneath, the game could be any physics-based platformer, but the presentation made it so much more. It will be sometime before I forget the sequence with the spider and the lost boys. The transition from the game's ending back to the main menu was also superb and tied in beautifully with the game's overall themes of death and loss.

If anything, its only fault was that it played its cards too early. The woods were far more immersive and memorable than any of the later industrial stages. I understand why the stages progressed in this fashion, but they just weren't as enjoyable. Several puzzles also relied too much on twitch reflexes, that meant some players were stuck long after they knew how to progress.

People wrote many things about Limbo. Nels Anderson looked at Limbo specifically and 2D indie platformers generally and asked if they should be applauded for their unqiue thematic presentation, or criticised for their by-the-book platforming design. The debate continues for some time in the comments. Kirk Hamilton probably wrote the most interesting review of Limbo over at Paste and also tackled that one horrible-designed puzzle that nearly wrecked the game for so many players (self-included). Countless other great pieces were written both for and against Limbo all over the internet, too.

Limbo also allowed me to first dare put into words ideas I have about a concept I have been calling player privilege. They were very rough ideas, and they have changed much since those two posts (thanks largely to the many comments both posts received), but it was Limbo that first helped me to squeeze the words out.

Super Meat Boy

Yet another indie platformer! One of the things I found most fascinating about Super Meat Boy was the amount of hype surrounding it before it was even released. Hype... for an indie title! So much so that on several occasions, several months apart, I assumed it must have already been released. Team Meat did an excellent job of forming a community and getting them excited about the game in a way few indies have managed.

When it was finally released (I was resetting my 360 constantly to update the Games Marketplace) I was rewarded with the purest, most enjoyable platforming I've experience since Donkey Kong Countr II (possibly an odd comparison, but I was never much of a Mario player). This was not platforming in the same way as Limbo, which used platforming as a vessel for a puzzle game and an atmospheric experience, and not in the same way as VVVVVV which just changed around a few mechanics. Rather, Super Meat Boy took the existing mechanics of run, dash, jump, and wall-jump and polished them to a mirror's sheen until it all just felt so, so, so right.

The game is just a joy to play in every respect; it really is that simple. Some may find the difficulty too high in places, but I never felt like I was 'stuck', even when I was repeating the same level dozens of times. In a similar vein to Nels's post above, Michael Abbott wrote a good post applauding Super Meat Boy and other 2D indie platformers and claims that platformers are the gaming equivalent of jazz music. The development blog at Team Meat's website has many good reads from the development process, such as this one about risk and reward.

Heavy Rain

Ah, Heavy Rain. Despite getting so much wrong, it somehow managed to get so much right. I enjoyed the one time I played the game through, but I have no inkling to go back and try a second time to see what difference outcomes are possible. The story was drab, generic, sometimes illogical, and could have been pulled from any weeknight crime show, but the simple (some would say meager) interactivity really added something for me. I'm not certain just how often my actions actually made a difference, but it always felt like they made a difference, and that was important. It's also why I am reluctant to play it again.

This weight on my decisions and actions largely comes down to the fact the Heavy Rain is continually moving forward. If a character dies, the game continues to progress. Much like I mentioned for One Chance and Minecraft, that my actions were final made them more meaningful to me.

What I also found interesting about Heavy Rain was not just how my conscious decisions affected the narrative, but how the narrative was affected by me stuffing up. Missed quick time events were the difference between life and death for a character is some situations. I'm interested to see other games implement ways for the player to incidentally affect the outcome, not just consciously.

The game's problems can't be ignored, however. The early scene in the shopping mall that sets up the entire story is completely non-nonsensical and ridiculous and has been lampooned quite well in both flash and song form. The treatment of Madison Paige as a constant victim of sexual violence (and not much else) was also problematic. Denis Farr had an excellent post at The Border House blog about that.

A couple of other pieces worth reading are Julian Murdoch's 'review' (I would call it a review, at least), and Ian Bogost's opposition to Heavy Rain being billed as an 'interactive film'.

Assassin's Creed II

This technically isn't a 2010 game, but 2010 was the year that I played it. Many people that I follow on Twitter had been discussing how much they were enjoying Brotherhood, so I decided I should play the original sequel in order to check out the sequel's sequel. Sadly, that looks unlikely to happen anytime soon as it does not look like I will be completing Assassin's Creed II any time soon.

Curtly, I am not enjoying it. The game has some very strong systems at its core, and improves on the gameplay of the first game greatly. However, the writing is consistently terrible, the pacing is non-existent, and the story might as well not-exist. This all combines to create a complete lack of intrinsic motivation--I can do so many cool things in this game, but there is just no point to do it.

Perhaps this is largely because I cannot care for the world and its inhabitants in the same way I care for those of The Capital Wasteland, Panau, or Liberty City. The nuances that most open-world games have are missing; the world around you just doesn't react to your actions. In one mission there is a full-on war being waged on the streets of a city. Among the sword fights, an old lady was sweeping her doorstep. Around the corner, two old men sat casually on a bench. These were not standalone occurrences and completely pulled me out of the experience.

There is a lot of potential here, and perhaps a gamer less-inclined to care about story and fiction than myself could really just enjoy jumping around and fighting guards (which really is quite fun). Much like ModNation Racers, the game-breaking flaws frustrated me so much because what Assassin's Creed II gets right, it gets very right. I would have been interested to explore Ezio's growing up into an assassin, but it all happens too slowly and then too quickly. He is a master of parkour before he has any right to be, and then he is committing cold-blooded murder without a second thought moments later. I would have liked to have seen a steadier progression, perhaps some sign of shock or reluctance at his first murder. Perhaps one day the gameplay will return me to the cities of Italy, but for now the nonsensical story and horrible plotting is keeping me well away.

And so ends Part Three of Thoughts on 2010! One more part and five more games to go!

Some Thoughts on 2010: Part Two

2011-01-03T03:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I posted Part One of my 2010 retrospective where I am just writing a few paragraphs about the games I played this past year. Yesterday I covered Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, Minecraft, Sleep is Death, and Halo Reach. Part Two continues with games in no particular order.

Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption was easily my most anticipated game of 2010. No one can suck me in with a series of pre-release trailers like Rockstar. Grand Theft Auto IV is still my favourite game of this generation of consoles and the simple idea of 'GTA on horses' was enough to get me excited--as much as Rockstar urged that Red Dead Redemption was more than that. I was looking forward to the same level of incredible world-building, unforgettable characters, and biting dialogue (and hopefully without the same juvenile, gutter-trash dialogue).

My expectations were not surpassed so much as rendered null. In many ways, Red Dead Redemption is just GTA with horses, but in many other ways it is completely different. The characters are more plausible (if rarely any more likeable). The overall tone is more mature. The world is staggeringly beautiful in a way completely unlike Liberty City. Often I would just pause atop a mountain, mid-mission, just to watch the clouds over the plains.

The game does fall down in many of the same places Grand Theft Auto IV did. While many of the characters were more tolerable, few are likable. Rockstar's obsession with satire has rendered another world of empty, despicable characters. Then there is the notorious trek into Mexico where both the story and pacing go off the rails before the games final part brings things back together for one of my all time favourite game endings.

Red Dead Redemption was also responsible for some stunning pieces of games writing this year, too. Michael Abbott's battle with Armadillo's anti-semite shopkeeper was an early favourite. Another great piece of writing seems to have disappeared from the internet, I am afraid. I distinctly remember reading this piece where a player was playing as a pacifist, walking around a multiplayer free-roam map just tracking wildlife and being murdered by more violently-inclined players. If anyone knows the piece I am talking about, I would greatly appreciate a heads up in the comments. EDIT: If anyone can track down a piece of games writing on the internet, it is Ben Abraham, and he came through for me this time. Here is the piece I was thinking of: "Call of the Wild West" by Brendan Caldwell.

VVVVVV

Another great indie title for 2010, VVVVVV is a straightforward platformer that takes the core mechanic (jumping) and tweaks it to completely change how you approach the game. Instead of jumping, in VVVVVV you flip. When the flip key is pressed, the character falls up until they hit the ceiling, where they will stay until you flip back and fall down to the floor. In the same vein as Portal, this change meant that I had to completely rethink how I approached puzzles that I had already solved a dozen times in previous platformers with a simple jump.

The game's presentation is slick, too. I can understand if some people have had enough of the latest retro trend, but VVVVVV's 8-bit graphics and chiptune soundtrack is stunning. It is on Steam these days, too. Strongly recommend you check it out if you are yet to.

One Chance

An interesting and memorable little browser-based game that forces you to make decision and then live with them. In a way, One Chance is a perma-death experiment. Every decision you make is final. You cannot restart; you cannot try again. And when you complete the game, that is it; you cannot start again.

Interesting, that I found a game that I spent little more than a quarter-hour playing memorable enough to including on an end-of-year list. Or perhaps that isn't surprising at all. When games force the player to live with their decisions, the player will have a more meaningful experience, just as Minecraft forces the player to perpetually move forward in time.

When faced with permanent consequences, you might be surprised by the decisions you make. It has a few bugs, but generally runs quite smoothly. It will only take about ten minutes to play and is really worth trying out.

Just Cause 2

I almost missed this one. When it first came out, I played the demo, enjoyed it, but not enough to consider buying the full game. This last fortnight, though, I found it on sale and decided it was time. The story is terrible and the voice-acting even worse (what is with that woman in charge of the communist faction?) but the game beneath it is crazy fun.

Overall, the game feels like San Andreas combined with the rope tool of Garry's Mod. What makes the game work is its systems. Everything is tweaked in just a way to ensure cool stuff always happens. For instance, when you leap off a car and open your parachute, the car will only need the smallest impact to explode and add some extra drama to your escape. Or, my personal favourite: maybe two missions into the game I was being chased by men in jeeps. I did not expect it would work, but I tried to use my grappling hook to anchor one jeep to the road. Sure enough, the jeep lurched forward to forward-flipped onto its roof. There is little more satisfying in a videogame than when you think "I wonder if..." and then you actually can.

The central play-style of the game is also well-treated by the the fiction. The story of mercenaries and agencies is disposable, but the central concept of having to cause chaos to unlock missions and weapons ties in well with the sandbox 'dicking around' themes of the game.

Not that you need the motivation, just moving is fun. Jumping from a helicopter to land on a motorbike to then leap off just as it explodes into a service station as you leap onto the front of another car and then back up into another helicopter is just pure, rollicking fun. How long it will remain fun without a story worth caring about, however, I can't yet say.

Nels Anderson has a great post about the absurdity and possible campness of Just Cause 2, which I enjoyed reading many months before I played the game.

Vanquish

I never enjoyed Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. I don't dislike them, mind you. I can appreciate that both are very slick games, but I just don't enjoy them. So I was very excited when I tried the Vanquish demo and actually enjoyed it. It's a fresh take on the cover shooter in that it punishes you for staying still--an odd move when your central mechanic is taking cover.

The star of the game is not the cover system or the guns or the horribly cliche characters, but the suit that will have you boosting, cartwheeling, sliding, and throwing oversized missiles back at oversized mechs. Interestingly, you do not acquire upgrades for the suit as the game progresses. You finish the game capable of nothing you could not have achieved at the start of the game. Rather, it is your understanding of the suit and what you can do with it that must improve. The stead learning curve complements this nicely and by the end of the game you will be darting around like an expert, ready to begin again on the next difficulty setting.

Similar to Just Cause 2, the story is an absurd throwaway... perhaps. I have a theory that Vanquish's story is not cliche so much as it is a deliberate, tongue-in-cheek parody of western videogame tropes. I have a half-written blog about this that I will hopefully get finished in the new year if I ever get the time to say it. Suffice to say, I'm not sure if Vanquish is the Japanese response to the Western shooter, or the Japanese pointing and laughing at the Western shooter. Perhaps a little of each.

And that is Part Two and five more games down. Unless I think of more that I have forgotten in the next couple of days, I will have ten more games across two more parts in the coming days.

Some Thoughts on 2010: Part One

2011-01-02T03:10:00.000-08:00

Like most of you, I played quite a few games this year, and I've had one or two interesting thoughts about most of those games. I'm not very good at end-of-year lists or rankings, so instead I thought I might just write a couple of paragraphs about the games that I remember of 2010, something I found interesting about those games, and some good pieces of writing I read about them. This won't be an exhaustive list, nor is it in any order other than the order that the games came to mind. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments, or links to any other interesting articles from this year. Suggestions of games I have missed are also welcome, but you might want to wait until I finish the series!

Bioshock 2

Nearly every review of Bioshock 2 that I read called it "the perfect sequel to a game that didn't need a sequel". For my part, it was a delightful return and fleshing out of a world I never expected I would visit again. I was wary the game would ignore the themes of the first game (much as the second half of Bioshock ignores its own themes when you are asked to continue taking orders mindlessly after the encounter with Ryan), but Delta's mental conditioning and the way it affects his decisions is blatant from the start. As you go on your quest for Eleanor, you know exactly why you are doing it: because you have no choice.

Gameplay and mechanics wise, Bioshock 2 improves on the first game's already solid systems nicely. The more open-ended design adds new dimensions to the city of Rapture and combined with the various new weapons and plasmids adds a whole new layer of potential tactics.

Bioshock 2's greatest achievement for me was that I truly felt like a Big Daddy. I felt big and bulky and heavy. My feet clunked on the timber flooring, my drill crushed the skulls of splicers, my rivet gun recoiled as the rivets punched through the air.

Also interesting was how my choices affected gameplay. Instead of the number of little sisters I saved just affecting what cut-scene plays at the end, it instead affected the kind of person Eleanor became and the decisions she made. Towards the end of the game, choices are no longer yours to make and you must stand by helplessly as Eleanor makes up her own mind. Yet, it was your decisions earlier in the game that determined the kind of person she became. You stand by helplessly, knowing that the choices you made allowed this to happen.

Probably my favourite Bioshock 2 related writing this year was Justin Keverne's "Groping the Map" series on Pauper's Drop. Definitely still worth checking out.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2's cinematic trailer ranks as one of my all time favourite game trailers, just behind practically ever Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. It was good enough for me to finally play through Mass Effect so that I could play Mass Effect 2. Sadly, I found the game only a fraction as enjoyable as the trailer. After all of Mass Effect and more than enough hours of Dragon Age (by which I mean ten very dull hours) I am completely over Bioware's "gather a party and save the universe/middle-earth" plotline.

Which is not to say I couldn't at least appreciate Mass Effect 2 is a good game, just one I didn't enjoy. Unlike Dragon Age, the universe is at least interesting and well thought-out (even if you only get to discover most of it in the 'codex' menu). And the symbiosis between player and character in Commander Shepard is done superbly.

Yet, the gameplay was disappointing, and I couldn't help but feel I had done it all before. I didn't 'quit' Mass Effect 2 so much as just stopped playing one day and never started again. I just didn't see the point.

Minecraft

Rarely will I classify a single game my Game Of The Year, but 2010 has a clear winner in Minecraft. Probably the only release this year that I sunk more than a hundred hours into, and I don't regret a single one. Minecraft means something different to each player. I never built more than a single-room hut, and I was never more than a tourist on the various multiplayer servers. For me, Minecraft was about the lonesome exploration of new worlds. I spent countless nights exploring the deep places of various worlds, filling chests with diamond and redstone, then moving on to another.

The game could evoke emotions unlike any other game. Distress, anger, exuberance, sorrow, disbelief--all from a procedurally generated world with no set goals. That every action is final and irreversible certainly had a say in this. The experiences and memories I have from my all-night sessions of Minecraft easily surpass any other gaming experience I had this year. Surprising, considering I am usually one for the authored narrative.

And then there is Towards Dawn. What started as a simple musing tweet of "I wonder what it would be like to play as a nomad?" has turned into a forty-day-and-counting adventure across strange and beautiful lands. Though, it has stalled the last few weeks over Christmas, I'm afraid.

Many people wrote many things about Minecraft. Experience Points had many a good post, as did Rock Paper Shotgun with their "Mine the Gap" series and their Game of the Year post. Meanwhile, at Binary Swan, Gerard Delaney was one of the first to unwrap, for me, just why Minecraft feels so good.

Sleep is Death

For the few days after Jason Rohrer's experimental title was released, my brother and I played nothing else. The stories we created were quick, nonsensical, and improvised, written on-the-fly as we hastily found default sprites to further the story. The potential of the game was massive, but sadly I feel few have realised it. I guess the community it required just wasn't there in the way it was for Minecraft. That, or I am just unaware of it.

The greatest element of the game was cooperation. I've seen too many 'player' players play the game as though they were in competition with the 'director' player, a competition where they must break the story that the director has planned. Of course, this is a competition they usually win as breaking the story is easy. This isn't fun for anyone. It's like going left from the start of 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers then complaining when you can't go anywhere. Rather, if you cooperate with the director, the game can be an amazing experience.

In one of my brother's and mine first game, when neither of us really knew what we were doing, I managed to paint an entire scene blue by accident. My brother played along by saying "Ah! Flood!" So we went with this. His family jumped onto the bed and sailed it out to sea, living on a diet of fish until they found an island. It was these experiences that made this game awesome. Sadly actually setting up a game was always difficult and I have thus not been motivated to put much more time into the game in recent months.

Halo Reach

The end of the Halo series, as far as I am concerned, and also the most complete Halo title to date. Bungie has taken the best of the first Halo, added the improvements of the sequels, and removed the ideas that never quit meshed. The story and pacing is adequately tragic, with the helplessness of Noble Team mounting gradually at first then exponentially later. It only suffered from a lack of subtitles informing the player of how much time passes between missions. Some were actually weeks apart, and the missions would have made more sense if I was aware of this at the time.

The juxtaposition between your initial setup of Your Very Own Spartan(TM)'s armour with the customised, individualised helmet of said Spartan smoldering in Reach's rubble was excellent. Many people would have spent many minutes perfecting their ideal Spartan, excited that they would be seeing that Spartan in single-player as well as multiplayer. And then, the second they start campaign, they know that that Spartan, their Spartan, will be dead. It worked stunningly well.

I found matchmaking far more enjoyable than Halo 3, too, but that is mostly because I seem to not such at Reach while I sucked quite incredible at Halo 3. Firefight, however, despite the myriad of new options, I found somewhat lackluster compared to ODST. I can't quite put my finder on why, though. Perhaps it is the map design. Reach firefight is excellent for a short game, but it can't put a light to the multi-hour marathon's I had on the open levels of ODST.

Roger Travis wrote a great post at his Living Epic blog that looks at Halo Reach in the framework of the classic epic which is a bit heavy going at times, but is well worth the effort.

And that will do for Part One of 2010. To be continued tomorrow!

Here's Looking at You: Reexamining the Relationship of Player, Character, and Game

2010-11-22T17:13:00.000-08:00

[Today I am heading out to QUT to attend "Games & HCI: A Long Romance", a workshop looking broadly at the topic of game interfaces as part of this year's OzCHI conference. I'm not sure if I will be talking there or not, but I'm looking forward to the discussions either way. For the workshop, I prepared the following academicish paper.
As I have mentioned previously, I am interested in exploring the relationship between player and character next year when I begin writing my Honours dissertation. Recently, I have started reading about Actor-Network Theory and have grown increasingly excited about how it may be useful for my studies. This paper, while very general and broad, gives a simplified account of how I am interesting in using Actor-Network Theory to look at this relationship. I feel I must stress that I am in no way an expert on Actor-Network Theory. I guess it is best read as a kind of hypothesis of what I believe I can show in the future, not of what I have already shown. Anyway, I am quite happy with how this has turned out, so hopefully you find it interesting.]

“In games more than any other medium often the problem is just you” – L.B. Jeffries.

When we discuss the ways in which players interact with games, in both everyday and academic discussion, it is not uncommon to discuss interactions in terms of ‘you’. In Grand Theft Auto IV ‘you’ explore Liberty City; in Mass Effect ‘you’ save the galaxy; in BioShock ‘you’ decide if the Little Sisters live or die. Text adventures and tabletop roleplaying games, meanwhile, use the second person construction explicitly: ‘you’ are in a dark room; there is a door to ‘your’ right; ‘you’ are likely to be eaten by a grue. ‘You’ is a necessary construct to talk about the hybridisation between player and game, but just what ‘you’ consists of has never been adequately accounted for. Who, or what, is ‘you’? The instinctive answer to this question is also the most problematic. ‘You’ is not the player. Or, more specifically, ‘you’ is not just the player.

Consider Hemisphere Games’s 2009 title Osmos. When the game first begins, the playable character, a single-cell organism called a mote, is in the centre of the screen above a line of text that addresses the player: ”This is you.” ‘You’ (that is, the mote controlled by the player) exists in a plane of other motes of various sizes. The player propels their mote around the screen, absorbing motes smaller than themselves to grow larger while avoiding being consumed by larger motes. In order to move, the player’s mote must expel mass that re-enters the level as more motes. Put simply, the mote controlled by the player—‘you’—is not just a single actor but a hybrid of many smaller connected actors. This simplest of examples shows that ‘you’ encompasses more than just the player. ‘You’ is a complex network of actors mediating and affecting the actions of each other through their own agency. One of these actors is the player.

Conflating the role of the player to the entire role of ‘you’ is problematic and prevents us from properly understanding the player’s relationship to the game and the interface through which they interact. Through the work of Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory, the full network of actors within ‘you’ may be rendered visible and the full cost of the player’s interaction with the game may be accounted for.

To assume that ‘you’ is the player conflates and privileges the role of the player’s agency within the game at the expense of hiding and dismissing a multitude of other agencies that are also present. This privileged understanding of player agency sees the other actors within ‘you’ as simple intermediary objects—mere tools—that transport the player’s input pure and unchanged into the game-world. The player says jump and the character, supposedly, does not even ask “How high?” This sees the relationship between player and character as not merely unproblematic and simple, but nonexistent—the character is the player, and the player is ‘you’. In Osmos, all the other motes consumed by you no loner exist. Such an understanding of you is useful to talk about the player and the game as two separate spheres, but is unable to demonstrate how the two relate and interact. Such an understanding renders the game interface invisible and untraceable.

However, if the player’s agency is examined through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (abbreviated to ANT), the complex web of agencies, both human and nonhuman, actual and virtual, that are in play every time ‘you’ acts are exposed and able to be properly examined. ANT demonstrates how all objects mediate and alter action with their own agency, and shows that the relationship between player, character, and game is anything but straightforward and unproblematic. ANT is able to challenge the popular construction of ‘you’ as being equal to ‘the player’ and can expose the myriad actors who mediate and are mediated by the player’s agency, the actors that are forgotten in our haste to place the player on an all-powerful pedestal of agency. In Osmos, the agency of the mote controlled by the player is utterly dependent on the motes that it has absorbed and the motes that it expels. ‘You’s ability to act is directly connected to these other actors and their mediation of the playable mote’s actions and intentions.

This is more than an act of semantics. Removing the player from the privileged position of an actor ‘over’ the game and instead understanding the player as just one more mediator in the game renders the full network of actors and their relationships traceable. This is crucial if the game’s interface is to be properly located as the connections between these actors, the interactions between player and nonplayer actors are the game interface. If the game interface is to be properly situated, ‘you’ must be opened up and understood as neither player nor game but as a hybrid of player and game relating to each other. “Agency is continually redefined within the hybrid occupying the spatial environment of the game even as there is an overall meta-negotiation within the hybrid triumvirate comprising the player, the code and the hardware” (Veale 38).

As we are used to dealing with ‘the player’ and ‘the game’ as two distinct entities, this sounds counter-intuitive to the way we typically think about how we interact with games. Should not the aim of game studies be to strengthen the player’s agency and to further immerse the player in the game-world? Of course. Thus, should we not be focusing on how to equip the player with more freedom, with more meaningful choices? Again, of course. But then why would we want to tie the player down to all these other nonplayer objects? Because, as Latour says so beautifully, you do not free a puppet by cutting the strings. “The only way to liberate the puppet is for the puppeteer to be a good puppeteer […] The more strings the marionettes are allowed to have, the more articulated they become” (Latour, 2005 216). Just as the puppet’s freedom is in the quality of its connections to the puppeteer, so is the player’s freedom in the quality of their connections with the game. The agency of the player is dependent on the agency of other actors within the game and their ability to mediate and relate to each other. The player does not need to be set free from the game, but rather they must be better connected.

To do this, the role of other objects that would normally be ignored in such account must be acknowledged as mediating actors that translate and alter the player’s intentions. For ANT, no object is an intermediary, merely outputting the same effect input by an actor. Instead, all objects are mediators that transform, translate, distort, or otherwise modify the meaning they are supposed to carry (Latour, Reassembling 38). An action, then, is never ours alone, but a combination of ours and a myriad of other mediators that the action passes and is changed through. This translation of an action does not relate a human actor to a nonhuman intermediary, “but induces two mediators into coexisting” (Latour, Reassembling 108).

Instead of seeing the player’s agency as a linear, directed agency leading outwards from the player into the game via an intermediary interface that passes the action on unchanged, an ANT description reveals the network of actors expressing their own agency back and forth through mediated interactions. When the player says jump, the character does not only ask “How high?” but plays a part in determining how high. A game’s strength is not in the player’s ability to act, but to interact, and any given interaction “overflows with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency” (Latour, Reassembling 166; original emphasis).

At present, as ‘you’ is often treated not as a hybrid but simply as ‘the player’, all the actors interacting within ‘you’ are often not accounted for and we are unable to account for all the instability and dissonance within ‘you’. However, if these interactions are traced, if the price is paid for the translation of an action through all the mediating actors, ‘you’ is exposed for the actor-network that it is. “Stretch any given inter-action and, sure enough, it becomes an actor-network (Latour, Reassembling 202). If the full cost of translation is paid for, if all the actors within ‘you’ are accounted for, ‘you’ can be understood as existing as a hybrid where the spheres of ‘player’ and ‘game’ overlap.

Veale succinctly describes the concept of the hybrid with his example of the humancar hybrid:

Humans are not allowed on to the motorway on foot. Cars are not allowed to be parked on the motorway. A human in a car (humancar) is allowed on to the motorway. The human’ s agency is redefined by this association, in that the human is capable of actions which would not be otherwise possible, such as speed. On the other hand, the human’ s agency is at the same time constrained as the humancar, since the humancar cannot do things which humans can. For example, the humancar cannot explore sights of interest on a whim and must proceed at a set pace without slowing down to savour the view. During the exchange, the human and the car have effectively disappeared and will not return until the agency of the humancar is abandoned (Veale 11).

Similarly, ‘you’ is not a distinct player interacting with a distinct game, but a ‘playergame’ hybrid that exists where the two overlap. If we look at both player and game as existing in the one actor-network, “we may be able to accommodate the hybrids and give them a place, a name, a home, a philosophy, an ontology” (Latour, Modern 51).

The player does not lose agency when they are connected to other actors, without connection to other actors the player has no agency. Rather, the player loses agency when they are connected badly. Just as the puppet’s agency is increased with more strings, so it can be held in bondage by the same strings connected poorly. If we wish to increase the agency of the player and create more immersive, more meaningful experiences, the solution is not to liberate the player from the game, but to pull them closer together with more connections, to increase the overlap between player and game that is the playergame hybrid. If we wish to truly locate the game interface and understand what it is doing to our interactions, we must account for the agency of other actors.

Jeffries, L.B. “On Design-Centric Game Criticism.” Popmatters. 2010. Web. 18 Nov. 2010.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Print.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Veale, Kevin. “The Amniotic Sac: Intersubjectivity and Affect in Computer Games” MArts Thesis. U of Auckland, 2005. ResearchSpace. Web. 18 Nov. 2010

Wargames

2010-11-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

While I don't think it aired here in Australia, I came across the following commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops via several discussions of it online this week.

Over at Border House, they applaud the commercial for the diversity of the people portrayed:

The commercial portrays a war in which a variety of people are the soldiers. The commercial includes people of color, men, women, people of various body types, and even a number of professions. All of these people are portrayed as equal soldiers in this war. This commercial implies that this first person shooter game welcomes adult players from a variety of backgrounds and is not simply a toy for men aged 18-25.

Meanwhile, writing over at The Atlantic, Sam Machkovech has a different take on the commercial:

I couldn't have asked for a more disappointing game-related ad. These aren't the video games I play. Even at their highest levels of action and violence, video games play like sophisticated games of Cops & Robbers. They're silly; they require colorful, funny-shaped controllers; they stay decidedly in the domain of detached fiction.

This ad equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat. The thud of recoil, the screams of rockets, the dust of explosions... and the look of exasperation on that little, shotgun-wielding girl. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.

It really is a slick commercial, there is no arguing that, and I certainly agree with Border House that the diversity of the the people portrayed in the commercial is (probably) a good thing. However, I also can't help but agree with Machkovech that the commercial is ultimately problematic. To try to express why I feel it is problematic, i am going to compare it to an Xbox commercial that Microsoft opted not to air. Machkovech noted the same commercial in his article and my conclusions will be similar to his, but not identical.

Personally, I think this second commercial is absolutely fabulous. It shows the true beauty of games: playfulness and imagination. Violence is not something kids learn just from videogames; many games (videogames, boardgames, schoolyard games nursery games) are situated in re-enactments of violence, either real or pretend. This Xbox commercial simply shows a large group of strangers playing together. It is cute. It makes me smile. I would love this to happen in reality.

The Black Ops commercial is trying to tap into a similar theme, I feel. However, while the Xbox commercial brings war into the context of games, play, and fun, the Black Ops commercial takes games and players and fun and puts them into the context of war. The difference is nuanced, but it makes a huge difference.

Using war as the basis for entertainment is already a gray area ethically. It risks belittling real acts of violence, real lives, and real sacrifices (to use a potentially loaded word) into fictional, consumable action plots. Generally, though, if the line between the two is kept clear, then there is no problem. You can have a game, movie, or book based on war that is entertaining that also acknowledges that the real war was not entertaining at all. It is a thin line, but it is one that various media have managed to more-or-less maintain through the decades.

And that is where the Black Ops commercial falls down. By placing the game players not in a virtual game but in a real war, the distinction between the entertainment product and the real war is blurred--potentially to the benefit of the former, but certainly to the disrespect of the latter. When I play I war game, I want to have fun, and I want to feel the gravitas of war. I do not want to feel that the two are the same thing, that real war is fun. That is when it stops being a game and starts being propaganda.

This line blurring is disconcerting from another aspect, also. I have written before (as have many others better than me, I don't doubt) about the blurring between 'real' war and 'virtual' war, as each looks more and more like the other. War videogames are becoming increasingly realistic while real wars are looking more like videogames with each leaked video appearing on YouTube.

As Machkovech points out, the tag line of the commercial is "There's a soldier in all of us". Not a hero, a soldier. Not "everyone is capable of great sacrifice and fighting for a noble cause", but "everyone is capable of being conditioned to follow orders and to kill without question". These commercial puts these two ideas together (war is becoming more like a videogame; anyone can be conditioned to be a soldier) alongside a young girl (or boy) clearing a real room with a real shotgun in a commercial for a virtual videogame. When I watched that girl clear the room, I was not sure if I should be happy to see someone other than an '18-25-year-old male' enjoying videogames' or concerned that I was seeing a child be conditioned into a soldier.

Which, as something of a side note, makes me skeptical of the true nature of the commercial's diversity. "There's a soldier in all of us". With the right technology and the right content, anyone can be conditioned to fight in a war, and not just any war, but a war as morally hazardous as Vietnam. Okay, perhaps that is a bit fatalistic, and I should just accept the one time the broader gaming industry does diversity right. But considering Activision's track record, I can't help but be skeptical.

So what are your opinions on the commercial? Are Machkovech and I the only people who have a problem with it?

Full disclosure: 1) I have been listening to The Rolling Stones all day thanks to the excellent use of music in the Black Ops commercial. 2) I have not yet played Black Ops and do not mean to comment on the game's content itself but rather the themes of the commercial and the content of war games generally.

An Update (or lack thereof)

2010-11-07T04:04:00.000-08:00

It has been some time since I have updated Critical Damage, and I apologise for that. The good news is that this is largely because I have been busy writing elsewhere. So until I finally finish off one of the three half-written posts that I am meaning to post here, I thought I would update you all on what I have actually been doing.

Firstly, and consuming the majority of my writing time, Towards Dawn is now up to Day Thirty-One and till going strong. I've had some crazy adventures and seen some amazing sights. I'm still unsure just how and when the saga will end, but when it does, I would very much like to compile the whole series as an e-book for people to download.

Still Minecraft related, I am now a writer over at CraftHub. I'll be posting things as often as I find things worth posting about and have time to post them. I would also like to use the opportunity to perhaps write some more in-depths pieces on this game that has consumed so much of my gaming time this year.

This past week has also seen my first two print articles published. Hyper 206 has my Minecraft guide "The Craft of Mining" in the Front End section, and Kill Screen #2 has a story I wrote called "Capture the School". I haven't received my copy of Kill Screen yet, but if the past two issues are anything to go by, it will be absolutely stunning and well worth your money--and less of your money than previously! Seriously, you will not find a better collection of game writing this side of the internet. As for Hyper, issue 206 is something of deputy editor Dylan's lovechild. He has put a lot of work into this issue and it really shows. If you are in Australia and walking by a news agency, go in and pick it up.

At the academic end, I am putting a paper together that I will hopefully get to submit for the OZCHI 'Games and HCI: A Long Romance' workshop later this month. The topic is going to be a furthering of an essay I wrote for a course this semester that looks at applying some Actor-Network Theory stuff to my interest int he relationship between player and character. The more ANT stuff I read (predominately just the work of Bruno Latour at the moment, I admit), the closer I feel I am getting to articulating what I actually am talking about when I talk about player privilege. I'm not sure on the copyright specifics of OZCHI papers, but assuming I am allowed, I will post the completed paper here after the workshop.

And that is where I currently am with my writing. I am also doing quite a bit of reading in preparation for Honours next year and my dissertation Similar to the above OZCHI thing, I will be looking at the player/character relationship through an ANT lens, which consequently will probably mean I will end up looking at the player/character/everything-else relationship if I am not careful. But more on that in the coming months.

As for games I have been playing, I sadly have not had much time to get too committed to any new games. I am still spending many hours in Minecraft, both in my nomad game and my more traditional games. I've also, quite recently, discovered the joy of multiplayer servers. I am not one for building towns, but just knowing that other people are in the same world certainly adds something to the experience. The joy of mining with a couple of comrades is also something I underestimated.

I have also been playing quite a lot of Super Meat Boy. The game is absolutely stunning and deserves all the praise it has received. The controls feel absolutely perfect. I love the way my entire body tenses as I realise that this is the run that will shave .02 seconds off my time if I can just clear this last jump. The game also acts as a sign of maturity of the medium of gaming. The multitude of intertextual references to other games is only possible because of the maturity of videogames as a medium. Somewhat related, I really enjoyed Michael Abbott's writeup of the game.

And apart from my nightly wind down in Audio-Surf, that is about all the gaming I have done. I dabbled in Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC (the subject of one of my unfinished posts for Critical Damage), and I still hit up Reach from time to time. I am yet to get Fallout: New Vegas; however, I think I may pick up a copy this week to keep me occupied after I get my wisdom teeth ripped out on Thursday.

And that is my update. Hopefully it will not be so long until the next one, and hopefully it will be more interesting than this one. Oh, and one last thing! Along with several other handsome, game-writing gentlemen, I am growing (or attempting to grow) a mustache for Movember. If you want to help men with depression and prostrate cancer, or if you just like laughing at how foolish we all look, you should totally consider donating some coins to our team.

Towards Dawn

2010-09-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

Hello there.

Due to my study load and some other writing commitments, Critical Damage has been a bit quiet lately. I have a few deadlines coming up in the next week and after that I will finish off a few posts I have been working on and try to get them up. However, in the meantime, on something of a whim I seem to have started a side project that is turning out to be quite interesting.

That project is Towards Dawn, and is simply a diary I am keeping of one specific Minecraft game where instead of setting up a 'home', I continuously walk east towards the dawn and note the new and exotic things I see.

In the earliest forming of the idea in my mind, all I was thinking was that playing Minecraft as a nomad could possibly be kind of a cool, alternative way of playing. The majority of players tend to have a 'home', not too far from where they initially spawn on the map. Sometimes this is a large castle; sometimes it is just the first room in the player's first cave. Typically this home contains vast riches that the player has mined and placed in chests for safekeeping. I thought it could be interesting to subvert this. In my Towards Dawn game, I only possess what I can carry with me. I have no home (though my spawn point far to the west still feels like home, interestingly). I leave as little a mark on the lands I pass through as possible.

I did not fully consider at first how this would in fact be something of a perma-death experiment, somewhat similar to Ben Abraham's Far Cry 2 experiment, or the many others that have already followed. I made no pact with myself to delete the game if I die, but if (when) I do, my nomad adventure will certainly be over. I will spawn back at 'home' and I most certainly will not be tracing my steps for game-days on end to pick up the trail.

Perma-death playthroughs are something I have been fascinated about for some time as they relate deeply with my interest in consequece (that the blog where Ben's initial perma-death experiment can be found is titled Sometimes Life Requires Consequence says it all).

The extreme consequences faced in a perma-death playthrough of a game highlight, I think, how permanence adds to the significance of a story. The story is not weakened by the player dying and then rewinding time to tell the story a slightly different way--the player dies and the story ends and is complete authoritative. This isn't how the story 'could' be; this is the story.

This is not to say that for the sake of story all games should go so far as to delete the player's file when they die. Rather, that permanency in some fashion can go a long way towards strengthening the fiction of a game.

Minecraft already had this before I began my adventure, and I would argue that it is one of the reasons the game resonates so deeply to so many people. While death is not the end in Minecraft, its consequences are certainly real. Minutes after my first ever diamond discovery, I tripped and fell in lava, losing said diamond, along with over two hours worth of other resources. I respawned and the game continued, but that loot was lost forever. The feeling of loss and despair in my gut as I watched myself burn to death that night was one of the strongest emotional reactions I have ever felt towards a game. That is not an exaggeration.

This occurs simply because of how Minecraft saves the game. That is, the game is always being saved right now. You cannot simply load an old save and not get your items back. The second you died, your game saved again.

This permanency, this fact that you can not go back, that you must keep moving forward, makes experiences in Minecraft more meaningful. At least I feel like they do for me. That existing energy is something that Towards Dawn is tapping into.

But that was quite a tangent! The point is that Towards Dawn is an accidental perma-death experiment, and I feel that is what makes it more interesting than if I were to simply blog as I begin to build a castle, die a couple of times, and finish building a castle.

But what is the point? What is Towards Dawn trying to prove? Well, I'm not too sure yet. I'm thinking that will become apparent as I continue to play. For now I am enjoying the new experiences my less grounded, less materialistic lifestyle is offering. When it ends (whenever that is), perhaps I will have something more profound to say about it. For the meantime, I hope you enjoy the journey.

You can follow Towards Dawn here, or start from the first post here. Also, I would really appreciate some feedback. Is it interesting? Boring? Is there anything you think should be changed in either the presentation or the playing? Let me know!

In other news, I am playing Halo: Reach. But this post has already gone on too long so that will have to wait for a future post.

Liberty Cities

2010-09-09T17:13:00.000-07:00

Crossing back-and-forth across Liberty City as Niko Bellic, I pass the same districts and landmarks many times every hours. I visit the same Burger Shot a block from Middle Park to restore my health as I once again cross the same bridge and exit on the same highway. However, there are city blocks, mere metres from my regular commute, that I may only glimpse once every ten hours. Other locales may go upwards of twenty, fifty, even a hundred hours without Niko laying eyes on them. When I do eventually stumble across these spaces (usually while hunting down a criminal or an elusive pigeon) I marvel that such spaces could have existed all this time without me knowing.

Something similar happens in real life. In Brisbane, I live near a fairly major road. Not a freeway or anything, but a major thoroughfare from the CBD to the western suburbs nonetheless. I live on the southern side of this road, and my bus travels up and down it everyday when I commute into the city. The northern side of the road is really not that different from the southern side. Yet, for me, the road has become some kind of imaginary border. I have little reason to ever travel north of the road; the streets beyond it have become this abstract, foreign land whose topography is nonsensical to me simply because I rarely go there.

The other week, my girlfriend and I drove into this strange land to visit an old friend. I was dumbfounded. What was this place? Were we even in the same city anymore? How could such a place exist so near to my home for so long without me ever seeing it? Yet, there were houses here. And cars. And shops. Clearly, people lived here. People not unlike me. For someone living in these suburbs, there would be absolutely nothing strange about The Area North Of The Road at all. Perhaps for them, the southern side of the road is the bizarre, exotic land.

Two people in the same city can see the same places in completely different ways. This in itself is not a particularly revolutionary idea. Clearly, individual circumstances such as social standing, means of transportation, physical capability, income, and class (just to name a few) are all going to affect how we interact with our environment. What I find fascinating is that this implies we never truly, objectively understand a space—we only ever perceive it subjectively, based on our own circumstances.

What does this mean for game spaces? What circumstances are in play that affect how we comprehend the worlds games present us? Or, more pertinently, whose circumstances? There are several elements worth noting, but in this post I want to highlight the significance of the playable character’s circumstances in filtering our understanding of the game world.

That’s right. The character. Within the game’s fiction and mechanics, the character that we control in the game world has individual circumstances such as social standing, means of transportation, income, physical capability, etc. These circumstances affect the character’s understanding of their place and role in the world, and this in turns affects how the player perceives and navigates the game space.

Placing the same player in the shoes of three vastly different characters within the same game space, Grand Theft Auto IV and its two DLCs are perfectly situated to demonstrate this. My understanding of Liberty City—both as a fictional world and a navigable game space—changed based on the character I was experiencing it through. While Niko, fresh off the boat, rarely travelled to Alderney, Broker may as well be a foreign country to The Lost and the Damned’s Johnny Klebitz. Meanwhile, The Ballad of Gay Tony’s Luis Lopez lives between the glitzy high-rises of downtown Algonquin and the projects of North Holland, rarely concerned with the other islands. The blatant difference in circumstance between the three characters both in regards to the game’s fiction (e.g. the characters’ differing personalities) and the game’s design (e.g. the different positioning of safe house, access to different weapons), trickled down to affect the ways I perceived and navigated Liberty City in very subtle ways.

The roadmap that had been inscribed in my mind as Niko (shop at this store; sleep in this borough; use this major road to get to that suburb) is formatted and cleared when I jump on Johnny’s bike. Alleyways, courtyards, and burger joints that I pass without a second glance as Niko, I suddenly notice as Johnny. This was not simply a case of not being thorough in my initial playthrough—by the time I first played The Lost and the Damned, I had spent well over a hundred hours in Liberty City as Niko.

At the time, it seemed impossible to me that I could still stumble across areas that I had never before seen. Once or twice I actually reloaded my original game just to check these places were actually there in the original story. Sure enough, they were; me-as-Niko had just never noticed them. Then, several months later, I discovered even more locations when I stepped into the shoes of Gay Tony’s right-hand man, Luis.

So what changed? I was exploring the exact same city with the exact same controls with what were more-or-less the exact same models with different textures on top. Simply, the difference is perspective. Niko, Johnny, and Luis all look at Liberty City through a different lens (as a fresh start, as a corrupt cesspit, as a mine of drunk socialites) and I as the player could not help but be influenced by this.

Each character looked at the city from a different angle. While Niko looks west to Liberty City’s trademark skyline from the docks he arrived in, Johnny gazes east at a mirror-image city from the safety of his clubhouse, and Luis (to appropriate a cliché) can’t see the city for the skyscrapers. It is inevitable that the three would see three different Liberty Cities, and that the player, looking through the character, would see each city slightly differently.

This is not something unique to Grand Theft Auto IV, or even to open-world games. I would argue that our understanding and perception of all game worlds are influenced by the circumstance of the character we experience it through.

Often this is depicted literally as part of the game’s mechanics. Optimal drainpipes and ledges don’t actually glow red in the world of Mirror’s Edge, that is just how Faith (and by extension the player) sees her world. Left 4 Dead’s survivors see each level as a path to a safe house while the special infected see a playground of ledges and blind spots. Killzone 2’s invading force sees an evil dictatorship and faceless soldiers with glowing red eyes, not a viciously patriotic people defending their home planet.

All of this is not to say that the character is the only element that influences the player’s navigation of a space. Certainly, game levels are designed in a way that the space asks to be used in very explicit ways, and the character we are asked to play is arguably a small subset of this.

It is also worth noting that how the character sees their world depends on how the player sees the character. I sympathised with Niko as a broken, tragic character trapped in a cycle of violence he desperately wanted to get out of but only ever made worse. A different player, though, could just as understandably see Niko as a crazed madman not worth a moment’s pity. That player’s Liberty City is still filtered through a Niko Bellic, just not the same Niko Bellic as my Liberty City.

The character is a lens through which our understanding of the game world will always be filtered. We can never see the world as it ‘is’, just as it looks from our own point-of-view.

Freeplay 2010: Beyond the Controller

2010-09-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

At last, here is one of the two final Freeplay 2010 pieces I promised to write. I walked into the “Beyond the Controller” roudtable discussion with a degree of pre-emptive (and presumptuous) reluctance. I was expecting a whole lot of death-of-the-controller, motion-sensor-utopia promotional talk. I was pleasantly mistaken.

While John Sietsma, Steve Bull, and Hugh Davies discussed their various augmented reality, transmedia, and cross-media projects, I don’t feel I know enough about augmented reality games myself to reproduce their presentations with any degree of accuracy—though, I now definitely want to learn more about them!

Truna (Jane Turner), however, started the discussion with a thought-provoking look at what precisely the controller ‘is’ and exactly what it contributes to our game experience. While all the presenters covered interesting topics, it was Truna’s talk that captured my interest the most and which I will be trying to do justice here. I should note, though, that I am basing this article entirely on my hastily scribbled notes so it should be read less as a report on what Truna said and more as what I personally took out of it.

“I don’t like controllers,” Truna began. “When you say ‘creativity’, I tend to think the opposite of ‘controlling’.”

By name, a controller is a thing that controls. But just what, precisely, is it controlling? This is not something I have ever really thought about. Clearly, the controller is so named because it allows the player to control some aspect of the game. But if that is the case, then it is the player that should be titled ‘controller’, right?

This all sounds very semantic, but what it comes down to is that the controller controls the player. Our actions and choices within the game are influenced, and to an extent predetermined, by the controller through which we interact with the game.

So how does the controller do this? Truna quoted Juul to say “The interface is the gameplay.” (I can’t find a reference for this verbatim quote but I imagine it is from “Easy to Use and Incredibly Difficult: On the Mythical Border between Interface and Gameplay”). The ways we can (and cannot) interact with the game determines how we actually play.

For the player, the controller functions as a form of prosthesis, replicating a limb that the player is missing. This prosthetic limb allows us to interact within the videogame world and serves the illusion that the fourth wall between the real and virtual worlds has been crossed: if what we are holding feels like a gun, then it is a gun.

For Truna, there exists two broad categories of controllers: specific and abstract (or generic). Within the specific grouping are controllers built for a specific style of gameplay: fishing rods, guitars, light guns, etc. that direct gameplay in a very narrow way. Abstract controllers are the more typical gamepads that the majority of console games rely on. Though, abstract controllers do not allow any more freedom for the player; rather, they just disguise the ways in which the player is being controlled. For Truna, the abstract controller is designed for two things: moving and shooting stuff.

Truna also made it clear, though, that she did not believe Sony and Microsoft’s new motion controllers were in any way moving beyond the controller. She pointed at a Microsoft press release that describes the Kinect as a “natural user interface”. But a player should be more than a user. Motion controllers do not remove the controllers (it is still in the name!); they merely remove them from the player’s hand. Using the player’s body as a controller is still situating a controller between the game and the player themselves.

So ultimately, the controller works to both give the player a sense of empowerment and agency (the player thinks, “I have a gun and I can shoot it whenever I want!”) and to discreetly remove the player’s actual agency (the player rarely thinks, “I can shoot, but I can’t do anything else.”). Our presence in the game world and the choices we make there are underpinned (and undermined) by the controller’s influence over us.

What Truna ultimately wants is for us to “think our way into games”. I initially took this as wanting some futuristic tech that we can plug into our brain. But the following speakers, with their different implementations of augmented reality games (such as Transumer and Jewel Collector) demonstrated how thinking into games would actually work.

John Sietsma summed up nicely what all the demonstrations showed: the more technology you add to a game, the more authority you ultimately remove from the player. Technology allows augmented reality games do things like geocaching and networking and recording data, but it weakens personal communication and (most importantly I think) limits the senses that the player is able to use.

So overall, what I took out of the discussion is that controllers aren’t ‘bad’ things that we must do away with, but they are doing very specific things to how we play, and we should be aware of that.

Guest Moments: Diary of a Minecrafter

2010-08-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

[In this pseudo-regular section, I record some of my more memorable gaming moments, the moments that remind me why I play games. Those who follow me on Twitter will already be aware of my recent obsession with Minecraft's emergent gameplay. The simplest of systems (mine resources to craft tools to mine better resources to craft better tools) is applied to a sprawling, procedural world for you to explore, tame, and master. New stories are born practically by the minute. The following is one such story. However, it is not my own.

The first time I read the following story I was laying in a bed in a Melbourne youth hostel. It was 7am on a Sunday morning and my phone beeped with a new email. For some reason I rolled over and checked it, only to find this rambling, livid, excited tale from my brother, Glynn Keogh, who had just lost an entire night to his Minecraft world. It was a good tale that exemplified exactly what I love about this game, so I asked him if he would let me re-post it here. So thanks, Glynn, for the following tale.]

Note: Screen captures are taken from my own game, not Glynn's adventure.

Progress on the subterranean highway is going well. For many long hours I have toiled down here, far below the surface world, forging a safe path hidden from the ferocious creatures and demons that roam through the night up above. It started out as a humble mine, but time and necessity drove me to make it so much more. Back up on the surface I am constantly on edge as soon as that great square sun hits the horizon; but buried here amongst the rocks and dirt, I am safe and free.

For the hundredth time tonight, my pick axe digs into the tunnel wall, and another chunky cube of rock breaks off. The highway is another foot longer. Soon it will be time to travel back to the tunnel entrance and begin laying tracks for the cart system that will eventually make journeys faster and safer. A few more squares and I will raise another shaft to the surface to gauge my progress, for it is daylight and the world outside is safe. Another chunk of rock breaks apart, the sound reverberating off the tunnel walls. But there’s also another sound, the most dreaded sound a minecrafter will ever hear underground.

Running water.

I curse to myself and continue to listen, struggling to pin-point the direction of the underground stream. It seems to be coming somewhere from the left of the tunnel, but for all I know I may hit it if I continue forwards, too. This is my first Minecraft world and I’ve never struck water underground before, but I know it’s something I certainly don’t want to do. This tunnel is the backbone of my entire domain and I cannot afford to lose it; I have no wish to risk the surface world at night. There’s really only one option, so I backtrack slightly and begin digging into the wall towards the sound: better to find the stream on my own terms than unwittingly flooding the entire highway later on. Grabbing a torch from my pack, I seal the side passage off behind me in case the worst happens. One way or another I will find the stream, but it will never reach the highway if I can help it.

I dig for a long time, far longer than I expected would be necessary. The sound of rushing water is misleading; it seems to come from all directions yet never can I locate the source. My good steel pick is blunted from the continuous digging, and I am forced to use my back-up stone picks. Soon even they are all but exhausted. My torch supply is also dwindling rapidly. I decide that once my last pick is gone I’ll head back to my safe house at the mine entrance, make some new tools and go back to the tunnel proper. If I can’t find the water after this long it must be safe enough to keep digging. My final torch dug in to the ground beside me, I dig away at the rock one final time and my pick is destroyed. The rock drops to the ground…followed by a rushing torrent of water.

In that brief second when the water pushes its way through the hole, I realise just how inexperienced a miner I am. The side tunnel I’ve dug is completely unorganised and random, the result of me wildly trying to trace the confusing sounds. Worse still, the tunnel slopes away downwards the way I came. As the water hits me I know with utter certainty that this tunnel is almost perfectly built to become completely flooded.

Suddenly I’m under the surface, and so is my nearest torch. A few seconds more and the torrent has smothered my other light sources. I’m plunged into darkness so complete my monitor may as well be turned off. All I can see is my rapidly dwindling air supply, and all I can hear is rushing water. Every now and then my head somehow breaks the surface and I stop myself from drowning, but I can tell that I’m being swept far further than the start of this tunnel. Somehow I’ve entered a natural cave system.

After awhile I manage to clamber on to dry land, amazed at the fact that I haven’t died. The rushing water has deposited me somewhere on a cavern floor and continues to flow past me in the dark, sounding deceptively tranquil and calm. I have no idea where I am, only that I didn’t build it. There is no way out; the newly formed river is filling the only entrance to the cave, and I have no wish to jump back in any time soon. I have no torches, no picks or shovels, and no coal. All I have left in my inventory is my sword, some wood, and the stone I have been mining. Resigned to finding my way out with zero lighting, I turn off all the lights in the house and count myself lucky that it’s 1am; by making my own world pitch black I can faintly make out the outlines of the cave with some effort. With a chunk of rock in my hand I begin pounding at the wall of the cavern, prepared to dig my way out by hand. This will take some time.

I dig for a ridiculously long time, guided only by the soft, constant trickle of water. I follow the underground river upstream, hoping to work my way back to a familiar tunnel. Several times along the way I am forced to hastily dam the stream and alter its course, lest I be swept away once more. Finally, my eyes aching and my hands sore from clawing through so much solid stone, I break through into another cavern. The hole I’ve dug is already leaking water as I once again have struck the cursed river, but I manage to duck through the tiny gap without being swept away. Incredibly, this cavern is actually lit, and for the first time in ages I can actually see properly. The cavern is beautiful in a deadly sort of way. The centre of the floor is a pile of loose gravel, which I manage to climb on to with some effort. The mound is surrounded on one side by the large body of water I had managed to find myself under, and on the other by a huge pool of lava, the source of the glow.

As I stand surveying the scene, my screen suddenly flashes and I am knocked forwards as something strikes me from behind. Only luck stops me from falling head first into the lava. Turning around, I see a zombie advancing out of the shadows towards me. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t scare the crap out of me after all I’d been through. I draw my sword and charge the monster, knocking it back and gaining myself a little room to maneuver. I duck around behind it in an effort to get away from the lava, receiving a blow to the head for my troubles. My hearts perilously low at this stage, I know that another hit will end this adventure. I charge a final time, and send the zombie flying into the molten rock. I start breathing again.

I slouch away from the computer for a moment; my nerves just can’t take it anymore. As I watch the lava flow slowly by, I decide upon a course of action. I retrieve the almost forgotten planks of wood from my pack and craft them into a workbench. I could have done this earlier, but the notion of crafting items in pitch-black damp caves seemed too unfeasible for me to consider. But here in the light of the lava, I could finally set to work. Using the very last of my wood and some stone I manage to craft a single low quality pick. It is the most wonderful tool I’ve ever held. My new pick in hand, I begin the task of digging my way out. By now I have no idea where I am or in which direction lay the subterranean highway, so I go the only way that makes sense: up. All this effort, all this time and glorious adventure in the name of fleeing the surface, and now I am desperate to escape the underground and see the sky once more. Therein lies the beauty of this game: every hole I dig, every wall I build, every tool I craft is all in the name of forging a little place where I can be safe. And now, as I claw away the last few chunks of dirt and sunlight shines down onto my face for the first time in hours of play, I am finally safe.

After finally finding my way home from that fantastic and terrifying hole in the ground (another adventure in itself), I am once more at the advancing end of the subterranean highway. Now with new tools in hand and a good number of fresh torches in my pack, I am ready to continue my work. The sound of running water is no longer audible through the tunnel walls, and I can only assume that my efforts to redirect the stream were successful in leading it away from this point. In any case, I am not about to go looking for it again. Happy to finally be back to mining, I swing my pick at the wall and another chunk of rock shatters. But before I can swing again, the gap I have opened up is filled with loose gravel. I scoop it clear, and yet more replaces it. Careful to avoid a fatal cave-in, I continue scooping away the debris until the flow stops suddenly. With a loud clatter, something heavy lands at my feet.

A makeshift workbench which, until moments ago, had been resting on a pile of gravel between a river of water and a pool of lava in a cavern, which is beautiful in a deadly sort of way, not 3 squares above the fore of my subterranean highway.

Feeling Every Punch

2010-08-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

A lot of insightful, thought-provoking views found their way into the comments of my “Player Privilege” post. One highlighted problem with my argument was that I failed to articulate exactly what I meant by wanting games that are more ‘difficult’. Adrian made the very valid point that simply making games harder for players would not be abolishing player privilege but instead would simply reinstate the privilege of the hardcore by making games less accessible. That games should require more dexterous skill was not my intended argument so this is clearly something I need to distinguish better.

Related to this, The Shape of Games To Come highlighted an important distinction between real-world consequences and virtual consequences:

"While I too would like to see greater consequence for player actions, I think I would draw a critical difference between in-game consequence and real world consequence."

As essentially what my broader argument is saying is that games could be more meaningful by inflicting harsher consequences on the player, the distinction seems like a vital area to explore. However, the distinction I would make is that they are not distinct at all.

So I am going to start with a wildly presumptuous hypothesis and then work my way back to it. So here it goes: the player takes meaning out of a game (both positively and negatively) through the ways the game affects the player in the real world. To twist this around: the real-world consequences of the player’s virtual actions communicate meaning to the player.

This implies an overlap of what exists in the real world and what exists in the virtual world, and indeed there is a whole body of literature on this topic that I am grossly simplifying and re-appropriating here. While both worlds have exclusive elements (we sit with a controller in our hand in the real-world; the dragons we slay, the cars we steal and the aliens we shoot exist solely in the virtual world), there is this massive gray area where the two worlds smash together like a Venn Diagram. This is the space where you read Fallout 3’s The Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide on the bus home from EB Games. This is the space where a real-world friend shouts “jump!” while a virtual squadmate orders you to “press X!”.

It is within this overlap, too, that we are able to interact with the virtual world. Via our in-game avatar, we project our real-world actions (pressing X) into the virtual world. This is how we play videogames. We poke a finger through this little window into the virtual world and watch the effects of that action ripple outwards. However, this window is not one-way. Just as we can effect change in the virtual world via real actions, the consequences of those actions are able to ripple back to us in very real ways—sometimes too real.

We want our actions in-game to resonate into the real world... but not too much. (link)

The Shape Of Games To Come, in his comment, clarified between what he sees as constructive in-game consequences and destructive real-world consequences by comparing how Heavy Rain and Mirror’s Edge respond to the player’s failings:

"While I too would like to see greater consequence for player actions, I think I would draw a critical difference between in-game consequence and real world consequence. I though Heavy Rain was fantastic largely because of how it handled this; I could lose whole characters, cut off entire potential plot branches and gameplay sequences, etc. based on how I acted in a particular scene. That was great.

What is not at all great is for me to be punished outside of the game for my actions. This has two possible consequences for me, both of which are bad. The first is that the narrative of the game is broken. I died a lot playing Mirror's Edge. And at the end of the day, that reinforced something for me - that the character of Faith could not possibly have done what the game said she did with the skillset the game gave me unless she ran into an almost infinitely improbable string of good luck. The second consequence is that the game has essentially wasted some of my life. Do I have to go back and replay the past hour of gameplay because there was no checkpoint? Then I have just lost an hour of my life, and now I will have to spend another hour just to get back to where I already was. That's not meaningful consequence, that's abuse."

These are both great examples. However, I would argue that both are examples of games projecting consequences from the virtual world back into the real world. They key difference is that the consequences of actions within Heavy Rain continue to resonate in the virtual world as well as the real world. That is, the game reacts to our actions (intended or accidental) and continues along a certain route consequential to those actions. This is a virtual consequence (because it affects the characters in-game), but it is also a real-world consequence (because it affects the way we play, progress, and experience the game).

Meanwhile, the Mirror’s Edge example is a real-world consequence without any corresponding virtual consequence. In short, Faith does not die. Every action between the checkpoint and our misguided jump is erased and forgotten. The player suffers consequences in the real world (loss of time, alienation at the plausibility of the narrative) while the character suffers nothing. Faith has no memory of that fateful misstep, but the player must remember every bone-crunching detail.

My initial hypothesis was that the player takes meaning out of a game based on how the game affects them in the real world. Now I don’t want to twist The Shape Of Games To Come’s words against him so the following is my own experience of Mirror’s Edge and Heavy Rain: My experience of Mirror’s Edge was marred by the way it affected me in the real world without affecting Faith in the virtual world. Yet my experience of Heavy Rain was improved by the way the consequences to my actions affected how I played the game in both real and virtual ways.

So where does this leave us? Have I found a wedge to distinguish between privilege and accessibility? Perhaps what I mean by player privilege, then, is that many games are being designed in a way as to isolate the player in the real world. The player is able to poke through the window into the virtual world then slam it shut before the consequences ripple back to affect them in the real world—ultimately blocking the player off from any meaning those consequences may have conveyed.

An example of this would be the choice to destroy Megaton in Fallout 3. While Megaton’s destruction has very clear virtual consequences to the citizens of the Capital Wasteland (a major town destroyed, many deaths, a large area radiated), the decision hardly affects the way the player progresses in the game. Regardless of what the player decides to do, they receive a house for their troubles. Further, the quests available to the player do not change—the characters within Megaton that give out quests miraculously survive the detonation. While the game’s karma system does quantify the player’s decision with ‘good’ or ‘evil’ points, the real world consequences of the player’s virtual actions are practically nil, and any meaning the player may get out of the experience is greatly diluted. [Edit: Okay. It has been pointed out to me that there are indeed a number of quests and other elements that are shut off from the player if they destroy Megaton so this example is in fact not all that great.]

At the other extreme, however, is what Adrian highlighted in my previous post as a potential abolishment of accessibility. This would be ripping the window from the wall and allowing all the consequences of the player’s actions to flood back into the real world with no real affect on the virtual—such as Mirror’s Edge or any other game with unforgiving checkpoint systems.

So ideally, the consequences of our actions should not be exclusive to either world, but resonate across both. At the end of the day, why would we put so much into games if we did not wish to take something out of them?

What I Learned at Freeplay 2010

2010-08-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

“Melbourne’s got a hipster-only policy, right?” I quipped at Fraser on Twitter, in reply to a motherly message about wearing enough layers. In the middle of winter, Melbourne’s weather can be a bit of a shock to us Queenslanders.

“Pretty much. The dress code is black clothes and no outward signs of enthusiasm.”

I was on the shuttle bus from Melbourne Airport to the city, thirty-six hours before the commencement of the second Freeplay Independent Games Festival. I’m not sure what I expected the festival to be like. It just seemed like the kind of thing I should be going to. If nothing else, the ideas of ‘Melbourne’, ‘indie’, and ‘games’ were enough to sell me.

I could not tell you where in relation to the CBD Melbourne’s airport actually is. While waiting for the shuttle bus, I sent out a simple tweet asking any Melbourne friends for directions to my hostel. By the time I was seated on said bus, I was engaged in at least five conversations, replying to an inundation of direction suggestions, public transport timetables, and phone numbers.

This set the mood for the entire weekend: friendly, insightful, and strongly reliant on Twitter. I met some incredible people, listened to some inspiring discussions, engaged in some mind-blowing conversations, and realised that the only thing holding back the art form of games is myself.

Friday

Okay, perhaps I should rewind a bit.

Before Freeplay was to begin, I had an entire day to mosey around Melbourne by myself. Twitter gave me some tips for coffee, for food, and for things to do, so off I went.

Thanks to Dan Golding, I ended up at the Screen Worlds exhibition at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image). All kinds of screen media were on display, exhibiting the diverse history of the screen. The pseudo-film student inside of me found it all interesting, but of course I levitated to the videogame tables. I spent most of my time at the exhibition playing Tempest, Asteroid, Super Mario Bros 3, and Tomb Raider under televisions flashing glimpses of Mass Effect, Shadow of the Colossus, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, and Katamari Damacy.

What really struck me was the complete lack of self-conscious justification for why videogames were part of the exhibition. It seems silly now, but I have come to expect any inclusion of videogames in any kind of art gallery or museum to come with an excuse-filled placard blabbering about ‘why’ games are there, as though they are the awkward kid at the party no one really wanted invited. Screen Worlds, though, and the diverse people it attracted, all just assumed that the history and art of videogames belonged there along side the old cameras and monochrome cathode ray tube televisions. I felt somewhat guilty that I had not made the same assumption myself.

Saturday

Freeplay Day One! I’ll be honest: I was freaking out. Not only was there the pressure of having to meet people I have never before met in real life (something I was greatly looking forward to but fretting about nonetheless) but also the nagging anxiety about the reports I was meant to be writing. You see, I was yet to convince myself that I was actually writing for Gamasutra. I was worried about the most irrational things (such as not being able to fit in the theater and completely missing the keynote). All this anxiety led to me waking over an hour before my alarm went off, showering, and rushing out of the hostel a good two hours before registration for Freeplay even opened.

This turned out to be a good thing as on the complete opposite side of the city I found a café in an alleyway selling ridiculously good coffee ridiculously cheap with (wait for it) soy milk for no extra charge! They also just happened to be the only café in the entire city open that early, I swear.

Anyway, 9 o’clock came around and with the course for my Neptune’s Pride fleets set for the next twenty-four hours, I headed off to Freeplay.

To begin the festival Paul Callaghan, one of Freeplay's two orgainsers, took the stage. Paul is a glorious, humble, modest man around which you cannot help but feel good about videogames. Bissell could remove all the pages from Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter and just replace it with a photo of this guy.

Paul, together with Eve Penford-Dennis, had effectively built this year’s Freeplay out of nothing. You could tell how much time, dedication, and effort both of them had put into the event from the way that started at loud noises. All of a sudden, my few reports didn’t seem like quite such a daunting task. These two people had sweated blood to get this festival running. It is a horrible cliché of a metaphor, I am aware, but totally appropriate. [Update: Okay. So I got a bit hyperbolic and vague in my writing. As Paul has clarified in a comment: "Just wanted to point out that this is the 2nd Freeplay that Eve & I have organised, but it's the 5th overall. Next Wave started it in 2004 and ran it again in 2005 and 2007. Without their foundation, I doubt we'd have been able to build it from scratch." Though, this does not change my emphasis that it was clear that they had put a lot of effort into this year's event.]

“Hello!”

And so it began.

Between seminars, I met some staggeringly awesome people. Particularly the GameTaco crew, Fraser Allison (from RedKingDream), Dan Golding (kinda from RedKingDream but also from everywhere, we established), and James O’Connor (from Hyper, Pixelhunt, and others). With these guys I had some great discussions. It sounds silly, but speaking out loud, with your actual voice, about ideas and concepts you have only ever written about is an incredibly empowering feeling. Simply being able to have a meaningful conversation about the map design of X game or the narrative of Y game was alone enough to justify the entire trip.

We were talking about videogames. In real life. This is a big deal. We weren’t hiding out on websites and social networks; we were in public spaces and shamelessly talking about our passions. Perhaps this does not seem like such a big deal, perhaps you live in closer proximity to fellow enthusiasts than I do, but it is not something I have often had the chance to do, and something that I did not realize I had been craving.

After lunch, Saturday afternoon saw how really interesting presentations. The “Beyond the Controller” roundtable looked mostly at augmented reality games (interesting and significant, but not my area), but also included a presentation by the incredible “game activist” Truna who gave a thought-provoking speech challenging our unconscious acceptance of the physical game controller. She did not so much argue that we should abolish the controller, but insisted that we must understand just what the controller is actually controlling: us. This is a topic I will be following up with its own post.

Next was Brandon Boyer’s keynote. Boyer’s speech was a quiet revolution and I doubt there were many in the audience not inspired. I had given up on the actual creation of games years ago but Brandon’s speech forced me accept that the actual act of making games is something I still desire. Not just another platformer or another shooter, mind you (ultimately what all my early game attempts ended up as), but something experimental, something personal. We each have an obligation to make the game we wish to make and from that the videogame medium as a whole will continue to evolve.

And indeed, upon returning to Brisbane, Unity and its various tutorials was one of the first things I downloaded and its learning has become a serious side project.

Though, at the time of Brandon’s speech, the main thing I was thinking was, “Geez I have to do this brilliant talk justice in a report!”

So, of course, I followed everyone to the bar as soon as the talk finished. Long story short, by 2am, after several drinks and several drafts proofread by my awesome girlfriend back in Brisbane, I emailed off my first report and went to bed with Brandon Boyer’s words still ringing in my ears (partially a consequence of listening to his talk on my iphone over and over as I parsed for quotes).

And the report actually got posted! Fortunately, Leigh Alexander is a phenomenal editor and squeezed the odour of gin out of my words and rendered my report readable. But that wasn’t until Monday. For now, I was still stressing out about the report I had just sent and the two more I had to write. But beneath that was one of those vague, buzzing feelings that I have come to associate with the earliest formings of a new idea.

At the time I assumed it was a new article I would want to write, but it would turn out to be something much more meta: a shift in the very way I think of videogames.

Sunday

Writing one keynote obviously did not alleviate my anxiety as I still managed to climb out of bed and leave the hostel well over an hour earlier than needed (despite only having gone to sleep four hours earlier) and ended up at the same café in the same alley on the same opposite edge of the city.

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman (As I believe I am meant to call him) kicked things off right away with the second keynote, “Play & Games & Videogames & Us”. He had a lot of ground to cover, yet he somehow fit it all in. If Brandon Boyer had convinced me that I should make personal games because they are meaningful, Saltsman convinced me making games is integral to our existence as human beings.

Following this, the “Twisted Space” panel complemented Adam’s ideas perfectly. A very broad and eclectic yet deep and thorough exploration of what we can do with space came with the broader theme of just how much untapped potential still exists in our medium if we are willing to explore it.

Though I had heard of it before, it was this seminar where I first got a good look at Hazard. Hazard is the supermutant brainchild of Alexander Bruce. This man is mad; his game is mad, and they are both exactly what the future of videogames need.

That whole vague buzzing feeling I mentioned before? Well this seminar is where I finally figured out what it was. Specifically, when Alexander said, “It’s a game. We can do whatever the fuck we want so why not do something cool.” This, coupled with the themes of the keynotes that we have an obligation to create ‘something cool’ would be the beginning of a subtle yet seismic shift in how I view videogames.

That night at the after party I was fortunate enough to be part of a conversation with Bruce about his game and what he is trying to achieve. This will also be a later post (though much brutalised as I was not taking any notes, sadly). Suffice to say he is absolutely mad and brilliant.

And, well, you get the idea. The two days of Freeplay 2010 blew my mind. There was something for everyone. In fact, everything was for everyone. A lot of the talks were only vaguely related to videogames but that was the point: play is everywhere and we as videogame makers and thinkers and perfectly positioned to tap that energy.

Throughout the festival was this empowering sense of self-worth. Not conscious self-worth, but assumed. This mattered. Games mattered. Not once did anyone try to justify games as art. It was presumed and things advanced from there.

That is the most significant thing I took out of Freeplay 2010: to not question how important videogames are, but to outright assume it. “Games are Art” is not the topic of a debate worth having, but a presumption worth making because beyond that is events like Freeplay and thinkers like Brandon Boyer, Adam Saltsman, Alexander Bruce, and the rest of the weekends speakers, and not the potential of what games can do, but what they must do, what they will do, and what they are already doing all around us.