Moments

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!

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

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.

Gods And Their Machines: Deus Ex Machina in Games

The fundamental point of playing a game is to face challenges that, while still challenging, are ultimately resolvable. A maze would not be enjoyable if there was no path to the exit, but neither would it be enjoyable if the path to the exit was a straight line from the entrance. Furthering this, when a game pits a player against a certain challenge, the game must ensure that the player has the means to overcome it. The means could be a certain tool, a certain ability, knowledge of a certain fact, or some combination of these. Half-Life 2 ensures we receive the gravity gun before we confront any physics-focused puzzles that require heavy or distant lifting; Zelda games give us bombs before any secret passages must be cleared; Shadow Complex does not require us to double-jump to any platforms before the double-jump ability is obtained.

As game mechanics, these all make perfect sense. If we needed to double-jump to reach the double-jump ability, we would not be able to progress. The challenge would be too challenging (i.e. impossible) and not resolvable. The game would be a broken game. A game, at its base level, wants to prevent our progression at every chance, but it also wants us to ultimately defeat it and must give us the means to do so.

However, as believable fiction, coincidentally finding the perfect tool right before it is required can be a bit farfetched. Why is the red key always left lying around outside the red door? Why do enemy reinforcements always wait until after I have taken over the AA gun before assaulting head-on? Why would the Great Spirit left to protect the sacred boomerang have only one weakness—the boomerang? What are the chances that if I keep running through the first unlocked door I find, I will eventually get to my destination? Suspension of disbelief is a delicate thread that is already stretched taut by our engagement in a work of fiction. When that fiction seems too contrived, too unlikely, it does not take much for that suspension of disbelief to snap.

Conveniently finding exactly the thing to overcome a seemingly insurmountable challenge is a plot device known as deus ex machina, and it has been around for a very long time. Latin for “God from the machine”, deus ex machina introduces a means to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, a way to get the protagonist (and the plot) out of the dead-end the author has burrowed it into.

In film and literature, deus ex machina is typically frowned upon. Usually it is the product of lazy writing. Without planning ahead, the writer has burrowed the narrative into a dead-end and can only get it out again by suddenly introducing a new character, a new tool, or a sudden-yet-convenient natural disaster. It is not believable and not enjoyable to read (that said, plenty of comedy harnesses deus ex machina where it is intentionally ridiculous).

As we watch the protagonist struggle, we want to think, “Oh boy! How are they going to get out of this one?” We expect them to solve the problem because that is what protagonists do, and we look forward to seeing what ingenious, thrilling methods they will use. We don’t expect them to whip out a can of shark repellent.

So in stories, deus ex machina should generally be avoided. In game design, however, as clarified above, the player must have access to the tools and abilities that allow them to overcome any challenge they face. So how do story-driven games give the player the tools they need without appearing contrived? Or is deus ex machina an essential plot device in game-story design?

Simply, to not look contrived, games need to ensure the player feels as though they have a challenge by harnessing an existing tool in a unique, improvised way—even if it is the only way that challenge can be overcome. If we watch a film protagonist and go “Oh boy! How will they get out of this one?” then, when we play a game, we need the chance to go “Oh boy! How am I going to get out of this one?” It is the difference between already having a grappling hook in your inventory and coming across a grappling hook at the base of the cliff.

By having some time and space between the challenge and its solution, what is essential on the game design level will not seem so contrived on the fictional level. Games such as Zelda and Metroid achieve this by having the player pass inaccessible paths and items for hours before a means to access them is obtained. Rather than feeling like a contrived solution to an immediate challenge, once the player finds the required tool, all those old paths open up and the player’s explorative abilities increase ten-fold. By having to backtrack to all those rocket-doors already discovered, it does not feel as though Samus conveniently found these rockets just in time. If Samus were to only find rocket-doors after finding rockets, however, that would seem contrived and unlikely.

Another solution is not to give the player a specific tool to overcome a specific challenge, but a range of tools that can be used and combined in a variety of ways to approach a range of challenges in different ways. Recently, I stared playing Alone in the Dark (the more recent, 360 version). While it has some quite horrible deus ex machina in the opening stages (a fire extinguisher sitting beside every burning corridor), the item-combining mechanic, as well as being able to pick up a variety of objects with different properties, keeps things feeling dynamic and not too contrived. Fighting one crack-possessed person, I ran out of bullets and frantically searched until I found a wooden chair which I stuck into a nearby flame (the whole building was on fire) and hastily finished the battle before I burnt my hands off. Perhaps that was the only way to progress at that point, and the fire and chair were placed there to be used in exactly the fashion I used them. However, it felt like I figured it out myself and like I was lucky to find those items.

The Halo games achieve this quite well, also, by limiting the number of weapons the player can carry. Depending on your chosen weapon-set, the player will inevitably have the advantage in some conflicts and the disadvantage in others. This is most sharply felt in levels like “Two Betrayals” where the player must switch back and forth between Flood and Covenant confrontations—each requiring different weapons and tactics. This often leaves the player with no choice but to improvise on the spot and leads to a greater sense of achievement. When you come face-to-face with a Wraith tank and blast it with a rocket launcher, it is usually because you lugged that rocket launcher across half a level, not because it was sitting right before the Wraith, waiting for you. This avoids the pitfall of deus ex machina and allows for a more convincing story.

But does it allow for a more convincing game? In Bioshock, when the player needs to become a Big Daddy to get a Little Sister to unlock a door, you just happen to be in the part of Rapture where people are turned into Big Daddies. Do people just accept this? When I was playing Bioshock, I certainly did; the coincidence did not faze me at all. It was not until afterwards that I thought about it as slightly too convenient.

Each storytelling medium has its own accentuated mechanics. Novel protagonists often think and muse to themselves so that their thoughts can be rendered into words for the reader to read; film characters strike visually effective poses, even when no other characters are watching, to help the audience read their emotions. Perhaps we are more willing to accept deus ex machina in games than other mediums as a necessary mechanic for game stories.

One argument in favour of deus ex machina in games would be that presenting the player with challenges specific to a new tool, ability, or character allows for an improvised training ground of sorts. While it may seem farfetched that each Zelda boss has a weakness to the most recently obtained item, these boss battles provide a space for the player to come to terms with the abilities of the new item. Similarly, Half-Life 2’s “We Don’t Go To Ravenholm” stage provides a training ground for the newly acquired gravity gun.

Uncharted 2, meanwhile, embraces deus ex machina. On the train level, when Drake is being pestered by the gunship, he stumbles across a very convenient AA gun. “How the hell am I going to take out a— oh… hello!” he exclaims as he stumbles across the gun that saves his life. While I typically roll my eyes every time I find the obligatory AA gun in every single game, this time I did not mind at all. It was tongue-in-cheek; it was conscious. Uncharted 2 knows that it is a game and that games require resolution to challenges so it unabashedly gave me an AA gun.

In The Matrix, the matrix itself is essentially a videogame. In order to complete the “Save Morpheus” level, Neo and Trinity need “Guns. Lots of Guns.” And that is exactly what they get. It does not jar with the audiences expectations as the hackers’ ability to manipulate the matrix has already been explained; Neo and Trinity are entering a computer program and will take the greatest advantage available—especially when the opponent is the computer program. In a sense, it is not even deus ex machina as it is entirely feasible within the rules set by the movie.

In another sense, though, it is the most literal form of deus ex machina as Neo plays God inside the machine world. Neo is able to do this because he is a product of the same programming that crafted the machine world. The machines, by nature, must do everything in their power to stop him, even if his ability to manipulate the machine world makes his victory inevitable. Much like Neo, the player must be the true god inside the machine-world of the game. The game must try to stop the player but, ultimately, it will be from the machine that the player obtains the means to eventually overcome it. It is inevitable.

For the sake of the gameplay the player must always have the means to overcome a challenge (except in rare exceptions such as Bioshock’s confrontation with Ryan or Red Dead Redemption’s ending). But for the sake of the fiction, the means cannot seem too contrived. The true god inside the machine is the player, but the game must do everything it can to fool the player into thinking the opposite is true. To risk an overdose of film analogies, C-3PO is the game and Chewbacca is the player. The game must put up a valiant, convincing fight, but in the end must let the Wookie win. 

Note: This post gets a Portal screenshot even though Portal is not mentioned at all in this article because I could not find any of the screenshots I wanted to use.