Ueda Coulda Shoulda: The Quest as the Shadow
Going by his two big brain dumps Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Fumito Ueda is a complicated guy to put in charge of a videogame: an ivory tower idealist, with only a passive understanding of practical architecture. As a dreamer, his ideas are too organic, too personal to fit the cliches that most of us take as the building blocks of game design. Knowing that, he sidesteps convention whenever it gets in his way which is often. The problem is in those conventions which, though they mean nothing to Ueda as narrator, just as frequently get in the player's way. The result is meaningful, painfully gorgeous games that are a pain to actually play making Ueda's statements, in all their profundity, accessible only to the most devoted.
Paired with a more down-to-earth design team to translate his ideas someone with a Valve mentality Ueda could change the world. So far he's been the master of the golden arrow: the idea so poignant yet so tediously executed that it creates a certain cognitive dissonance in the player, inspiring not so much awe as transcendence a deep need to puzzle out what went wrong and how to better it. As far as human experiences go, that's a pretty healthy place to be. So I guess Ueda still succeeds on a level, if not quite the level he's shooting for.
Furthermore he is learning, even as his ambition balloons. For all its faults and they are mostly superficial Colossus is far more well implemented than Ico. Many of the problems seem like they were introduced at the last minute, more out of insecurity than inattention. The three things that we, as an audience, can in turn take from the game are the theory behind it, the problems Ueda still hit in applying that theory, and where those problems came from in the first place.
The game's premise is right there in its title more so the Japanese than the English, though the English title tells its own story. Wander and the Colossus. There is the central conflict: between the wandering, and the Colossi. The game presents a huge, gorgeous, lonely world to explore, completely at the player's discretion punctuated by a handful of intense, scripted, violent boss encounters.
The game's story is one of greed, sadness, obsession, and more than anything ambition: there's a dead girlfriend, and the only way to revive her is to kill. Not just kill; kill huge and dangerous, beautiful and unique mythical creatures. For the sake of your love, you must go out of your way to destroy all. And with every life you take, you yourself die a little inside; become a little less human.
Violence in this game is horrible, nauseating, yet thrilling. It is not so much an act as a release. You do not so much plunge your sword into the beast's skull as you allow it to sink, as you give yourself over to the inevitable. Then the gore shoots out at you, and you panic, stabbing again and again, grasping to the beast's fur as it screams and thrashes in pain. And it dies, and you pant, and you just had the most exciting videogame moment in years. Then you try to run from the black threads that stream out from the carcass, but there is no escape from your actions. Sooner or later the darkness penetrates you. And you wake up haunted by yet another shadow.
The genius thing is, the game offers a choice. The player need not be violent. There is a whole world out there, full of nooks and crannies and grandeur. The game offers a loyal (and actually rather bright) companion in a horse, which the player may stroke at will. Granted, the player has to find his own meaning in that world; it offers no easy answers, and no promise of closure. It does not exist for the player's benefit. It simply is what it is.
What the world of course will be, to most players, is boring. In a videogame, meaning and purpose generally come from action; from fulfilling tasks, and progressing toward a preordained goal. Finding the best place to sit and look at the skyline is not the experience that most people expect out of a PlayStation; they want mindless catharsis. They want to know they have a place carved out just for them, and a definite series of tasks to fulfill, in order to win. That is meaning, right there. It's religion, dating, education, employment; everything that we use to reassure ourselves of our own value to judge that we are making something of our lives.
So the choice the game offers the player is not much of a choice at all: either be content with nothing but beauty and your own liberty, or do your work and get your reward however horrible it might be. At least you won't be bored, and then when the game is over you will have accomplished something.
If the outcome is inevitable, then what is the point of this conflict? Mostly, to enhance the resonance of the player's choices as whatever the player does, whatever violence he eventually undertakes, is of his own apparent volition. (And how much destruction has been begat of boredom, I ask of you.) Consequence and morality hold more weight when liberty, rather than simple fate, is at play.
Nearly every design element is geared either to convey a sense of scope or a sense of intimacy. The gameworld is supremely node-based (going by Brian Upton's vocabulary), with an endless horizon and landmarks out the wazoo, enabling navigation. There are a few paths, primarily to pace the approach to a Colossus battle, and many districts which again, in combination with the horizon and landmarks, aid the player with orientation. What edges exist mostly serve to encapsulate the node-districts the tower area, the forest, the mountainous region and give each its own sense of place.
The central tower is visible at nearly all times, from nearly any point in the gameworld. Save points are clearly visible in the distance, and can indeed be scaled (as they take the form of small watchtowers) for a view of the surrounding area, and maybe an glimpse of the next watchtower. Whenever a Colossus is defeated, it leaves a streak of light in the sky a beacon to again help orient the player, wherever he might be.
The focus on height and distance provide a continual sense of perspective, of context for the player in relation to the gameworld contributing to a sense of belonging or ownership. Being able to climb around on landmarks helps the player to claim them as personal discoveries rather than as sterile facts of the gameworld.
Although there is little purpose to most locations, and so no explicit reason to explore, the design focus on nodes puts a strong emphasis on downtime on exploration. That said, the dominant landmarks always remind the player of his pending Quest, and always provide a tether back to the "game" a goal, as such the moment the player grows bored and wants to progress. The downtime paces out the action enough to heighten the drama and immediacy of the Colossus battles; the Colossus battles are overwhelming enough to suggest a recovery period.
More than that, the majesty of the world and the lack of a driving compulsion to progress lead the player to question the mission. When the player seeks out and encounters the Colossi, they are mostly minding their own business. Generally it is the player who must pick the fight and go out of his way to do so. There is no rush. The dead girl is hardly going to grow more dead. The Colossi aren't going anywhere. This mission is no one's but the player's own. After a certain point, the game starts to feel a bit like jousting at windmills.
Were the game instead a boss rush, with a linear route or sequence of events leading to each encounter, the player would feel a driving sense of purpose. Of course he is meant to fight the Colossi, as doing so, or preparing to do so, is the entire fabric of the world presented. With liberty, however, comes uncertainty. Clearly the player is meant to progress, if he should care about finishing the game. Yet does he care? Must he care? And if he does not, then why is he playing? What other meaning can the game hold?
Colossus is almost post-Campbellian, in that the Hero Quest the framework that we normally think of as the meat of a videogame is actively questioned. The player can subvert the Quest turn down the call to arms at any time. It's all a matter of will. Yet the game does not abandon the Quest structure so much as approach it at a higher level. There is only so long the average player can live with "BUT THOU MUST!" before caving in. Unless he altogether stops playing, the player will, ultimately, surrender and accept his fate much as the sword plunge is not so much an action as a release. For all the introspection it inspires, ultimately Shadow of the Colossus is about giving up. About doing anything to escape emptiness. Even being a false hero.
Without going too overboard, it's worth noting that what makes the game work, as far as it does, is its wealth of all of the subtle details that so many other games lack, which humanize the world and its population that make it all feel genuine enough to be worth taking to heart.
One of the biggest details that most productions (especially American ones think of all those waggle-legged FPS characters) skimp on is animation and here it forms the soul of the game. The player character dubbed "Wanderer" by fans is a gangly, awkward young man. He is uncomfortable wielding a sword. When he runs, he swings his arms and legs with abandon, occasionally tripping over his own feet. He has no idea how to jump, and nearly falls on his face each time he tries. The only place he is greater than inept is on his horse, with his bow in hand although he can cling to things pretty darned well. He has a whole button devoted to clinging. See if you can spot the literature here, in light of the game's themes.
The game's main button, though, serves to interact with the horse. Call to it, spur it on. Cling to the horse, bond with it, and you can perform tricks like standing upright at a gallop. When you're off the horse, you can pet it at will though it gets freaked out by weapons. It will follow you to the grave, whatever weird situation you get yourself into. When you're on the horse, you don't have to touch a control; you barely have to steer. The horse is smart enough to keep you on-course, even down a winding path, without running into a wall or slowing down more than necessary. Again, stick this in your analysis machine.
Curiously, the player is given a different button to "use" Wanderer's sword than to attack with it. Using the sword means holding it up the the sky. If there is sunlight, it will reflect off the blade and form a beacon, pointing the way toward the next Colossus. Think about what swords symbolize here, and how poorly Wanderer wields it as a weapon. The sword, which is clearly not a part of Wander's normal life, as the primary tool to direct the player toward the next leg of the Quest given all we've seen so far, I think it's fair to say this is deliberate. At least as deliberate as the hold-and-release stabbing action. Or inaction, as it were. Reflex.
As in Resident Evil 4 or that scene outside Minas Tirith in Return of the King, when the player rides his horse which he will be doing at least half the time the camera lists off to the side. Or rather, it points straight ahead as it frames Wanderer in a low corner. Slowly, slowly, game designers are learning the value of subjective yet functional camerawork. With them off to the left, you can see them ride horse and boy alike yet your attention is on the horizon, on what you're riding toward. This is in place of staring at a horse's rump for the half-dozens of hours you'll be riding around, as you would with a more traditional tracking camera. Which, I ask, is a more significant part of the composition?
On a similar note, pressing the map button will cause the camera to swing up and rapidly zoom out, until the player's location fades into a pinpoint on the (cartographic) world map. This serves a couple of purposes. It contextualizes the menu screen by tying it into the game world as an abstraction. At the same time, it helps to illustrate exactly where the player is in the gameworld. The eye, following Wanderer, is drawn to the correct point on the map and from there can scout out the surrounding territory. Pressing the map button then becomes, in a sense, like climbing to the highest high ground possible. It is thematically tied to the game's natural state of navigation, and it is stylistically tied as just another subjective viewpoint among many.
The game is so concerned with camerawork that it provides three whole camera buttons, each with its own subjective view, each with its own function. The idea, I assume, is to cut down on as much player confusion as possible during Colossus battles as the player will be staring up at the beasts, running around them, dangling off of them, shaken around like a hankerchief on a fond departure. Perhaps they tried a few contextual camera systems, and found them all inadequate. This solution feels a bit unwieldy, I must say especially since, in the heat of battle, often none of them do any good anyway; all one can do is wait for the camera to right itself. Ah well; these are the problems we face.
Then there are the little garnishes the light bloom, the dust clouds, the way the camera blurs as it turns, to create a more organic feel. The sound of wind, and echoes where echoes belong. The fact that saving which, given the trial-and-error nature of the quest, is important here kind of makes sense. In Dead Rising, you save by sleeping or going to the toilet; here, you save by praying at and altar all natural moments of pause, worked into the play narrative. It all serves to enhance the integrity of the game world.
For all the game does right, there are two big areas that diminish that integrity: interface, and the Colossus battles themselves. Not only do they break immersion and irritate the player, either of which is forgivable to an extent; they can also interfere with the game's themes which is where we start to enter danger territory.
The interface issues are weird. They are just as clearly a last-minute change as they are clearly a concession to the fear that a traditionalist audience would fail to "get" the game. That gamers would be confused as to what they were supposed to do, and would quickly give up.
Some of the issues, like the HUD, are just cosmetic. When there are only two weapons the player can wield, and it is patently obvious which, if either, Wander is holding, is it really necessary to provide large, cartoony sword, bow, and fist icons? If there are prominent visual and aural cues when Wander is exhausted and about to lose his grip, do we really need a separate grip meter which, to study, requires taking one's eyes off the action for what might be a vital split-second? That said, the icons and meters do little harm; all they do is clutter the screen composition, and serve to remind the player that he is playing a videogame.
This sort of issue starts before even the game proper; between the long and wordless approach to the tower and the start of the player's mission, someone almost-seamlessly wedged in a new bridge cutscene that yaks at length about the plot, about the player's quest, his destiny, who he will be fighting and why and what will happen, and about how the game is played. At least it's all in a made-up language, though even imaginary speech feels out of place here.
More significantly, if any game should trust the player to explore and discover the game's story and nuances for himself, this is that game. If Ueda wanted to point the player toward the first goal, and to hint toward a method for finding the beasts, a better solution would have been simply to place the sword in the player's way as he leaves the tower. Make it an obstruction. Picking up the sword for the first time, Wanderer would hold it to the sunlight only for a beam to shoot out toward the horizon, pointing the way. The "use" button would appear in the corner of the screen to illustrate what to press, should the player wish to do this again, later. And that's all the setup the game needs; the player, unless supremely unobservant, would then or eventually follow the beam out of curiosity.
The same kind of dumb padding is inserted after every Colossus battle: there's the original, wordless cutscene in which we see a growing crowd of shadows around Wanderer's prone body. He stands up, gets ready for the player to take control, and then the Greek chorus chimes in again (in a new DVD-only scene), telling you where to go next, what you will be fighting, dum de dum. Who cares. Stop presuming to waste my time for me.
The plot dumps would be inane, if sort of harmless, on their own. Yet the game does not reserve its condescension for the margins between episodes. Some of its most obnoxious moments come when the player can least afford to be distracted, in the heat of battle with a foe way too big for comfort.
If the player takes more than a few moments to study a Colossus for patterns and formulate a strategy, the game begins to scream. An enormous text box will appear in the bottom-center of the screen, obscuring the player's view. The hint it contains is often as edifying as "EASTMOST PENINSULA HOLDS THE SECRET". The box stays on-screen for what seems like forever, with no way to get rid of it manually. Then if the player continues to fail at the precise action the game expects of him, the box will pop up again and again, at intervals of what, going by my subjective memories, can hardly be more than thirty seconds.
No! No! Never do this. Never do anything remotely like this. Navi is bad enough. At least the player can avoid Otis. This design decision on its own caused me to put the game on the shelf for over two years. However much I like a game's ideas, I refuse to be a videogame's monkey boy, especially if it chooses to scream at me. Especially if, in its concerted effort to patronize me, it causes me to fail at the very task it is demanding of me. Life is too short for that kind of frustration.
If the game must have a hint system, make it optional as in Metroid Prime. Why so few games follow that model is beyond me. Frankly, though, if you feel a need to dictate to your audience to ask "Hey, why aren't you doing what I expect you to?" then probably:
a)You are compensating for a basic failure in communication elsewhere.
b)Your expectations from the player are far too narrow.
The thing is, as a designer you never ever, under any circumstance, want a player to ask "What am I supposed to do?". The question the player should be asking is "So how can I do this?". The player should be focused on juggling the available options, and working out the best course of action not on second-guessing the designer's intentions.
If Shadow of the Colossus has a major problem, it is in direct communication of its ideas. Thematic hints and suggestions, sure. Want to explain something outright, though? Ueda's only recourse is the text box. If he thinks of it. For instance, one of the first steps toward reaching the first Colossus is climbing an ivy-coated wall. The game gives no sign that Wanderer can climb, or that the wall is in any way remarkable beyond its inconspicuously green texture. Had Ueda noticed the possible hangup, he would have thrown in a text box, instructing the player to jump toward the wall and hold the grip button. What he should have done is illustrated the issue. Trick the player into grabbing the wall, by placing a ledge, or the end of an obvious vine or handhold, just out of jumping reach. Show something else climbing the ivy.
Where this problem really manifests is in the Colossus battles. Each is rigorously scripted, with a specific, correct course of action expected of the player. Occasionally the context is sufficient to suggest a technique as with a flying beast that swoops when you shoot it and that flies in a set pattern past a raised platform. Or an aquatic beast, that surfaces in a set pattern. At other times, the player is left grasping at straws, trying to work out just what is expected of him. One Colossus, it turns out, will stare down into a barrow every time the player runs into it should the player stay down there for a certain number of seconds. The trick is to exit through the back door, then circle around to grab the beast's tail. Another Colossus is only assailable if the player backs under an overhang and waits for the beast to bend far enough over that its beard dangles close to the ground.
These are cute solutions, sure. The thing is, they are overly specific, not particularly intuitive, and not really signaled. Discovering them is not so much a triumph of mental or technical skill, or even persistence, as it is trial and error and a bit of luck. The time until the player happens to stumble across these solutions is completely wasted, as there is nothing else of importance to learn. Then typically the beast will shake Wander off once or twice, forcing the player to run through the same scripted motions over and over making their falseness, their tediousness, all the more obvious. Learn one arbitrary note, and repeat. This is not growth; this is not reward. Granted, that the structure is so asinine and "gamey" certainly fits the game's themes. Go and play the stupid videogame, or try to find meaning in nothingness. See which option people find more appealing.
So all of this is annoying, and makes the game obnoxious to play particularly to a less hardcore audience. It certainly put me off, and I admire the hell out of what Ueda is trying to do with the game. The real problem, though, is that it subtly affects the game's thematic balance. On its own, the gameworld is idyllic, serene, while the game is hard and obtuse. With his ambition, the player unlocks what darkness is to be found. The player needs to put in a lot of effort to do evil; to discover his own opportunities. Even if you know what to do, the tasks are time-consuming and arduous to perform. Evil is a burden that the player must bear on his own accord lending all the more poignancy to the game's central dilemma.
When the game specifically tells you what to do and where to go and how to complete your missions, rushing you from place to place, that changes the tone pretty dramatically. Instead of action being the "difficult" option, finding a reason not to act is the task and a task that will fail to even occur to many players, as they charge ahead to run through the motions, ride the roller coaster, as if this were any random action game.
Is the game less successful for its faults? Added up, I think so. The message is different. More pessimistic. A bit more obvious, I think. Without the blinking lights, the game would have been more about the subtle, narcotic appeal to evil (in the form of traditional videogame motivation), compelling the player to destroy the beauty around him. Now it's more about whether the player is even aware enough to notice that he has an option other than evil, then how far and how long he takes that option before giving in to the inevitable. The new message is certainly valid. Perhaps it makes a more classically entertaining videogame. I just think Ueda missed the chance for something more unusual here.
So where do the problems come from? Three things: insecurity, poor nonverbal communication, and ass-covering. The order I'm guessing is something like this:
1)Ueda and his team put together a ton of restrictive, overly clever setpieces, and failed to signal a number of key ideas.
2)During some late tests, players had a lot of trouble figuring out what Ueda's team expected of them.
3)Instead of going back to clarify the issues, someone decided to slap explanations all over the trouble areas.
4)Now paranoid that people would have trouble understanding even the basic concepts, Ueda's team stuck post-its on top of every possible object and command in the game.
I'll just assume, based on the premise that these issues came up in late testing, that Ueda's team was under time pressure by then so there were solid arguments for not going back and fiddling too much. So why not make the condescension optional much like the fully reconfigurable controls and optional 16:9 mode? Maybe it never occurred to anyone. Maybe it was quicker and easier to just slap in.
So there's a good chance that, by the time the problems with Ueda's basic approach namely his tendency to be kind of out-of-touch with the player became evident, it was already too late. And fair enough. He's a bright guy, and they did seem to notice the issues so maybe next time he will take them on board from the start. Still, I sure would like to see a "director's cut" of this game. Maybe in another ten or fifteen years?
(August 30th, 2007 @ 10:55am)
 . Defining the Next Generation
So we're practically there. TGS is well over, the pre-orders have begun; Microsoft's system has already been out for a year (and is now graced with a few excellent or important games). The generation is right on the verge of turning, and all those expensive electronics you've been monitoring for the last few years, half dreading out of thriftiness and secret knowledge that there won't be anything good on them for a year anyway, will become the new status quo. Immediately the needle will jump and point at a new horizon, set around 2011, and everyone will start twiddling his thumbs again. By the time the drama and dreams resume, I'll be in my early thirties, another American president will have served nearly a full term and for the first time in my life I really can't predict what videogames will be like.
There are, of course, a number of common factors in all three "next-gen" systems; together they hint at a sort of mass consensus about what all the major companies consider important in videogames or, at least, what they feel the biggest sticking points are with the industry and medium, as they stand in 2006. What makes prediction difficult is that all the players have their own ideas as to how to address the issues at hand and humans being humans and money being money, it's hard to say for sure which approach will actually win out, to dictate the next ten years of code and conquest.
Thus far, we've been on a pretty straightforward path if more by chance than any supreme plan. The history of home game consoles, Odyssey to Xbox, falls into three rough yet distinct eras, each bifurcated into two clear hardware generations: one of establishment (or evolution), and a further one of refinement (or growth). Thus:
a) Odyssey/Pong;
b) Atari VCS/Odyssey2/Intellivision/Colecovision
a) NES/Master System/Atari 7800;
b) TG-16/Genesis/Neo-Geo/SNES
a) Jaguar/Saturn/PlayStation/N64;
b) Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox
Again, the route seems pretty obvious when you look back on it: better resolution, more colors, faster processing, more things on screen. What retrospect doesn't get you is the existential crises that carved out this path, or what those dilemmas collectively add up to and maybe hint toward, in the future.
Take the first and most obvious crisis: the Great Crash, which capped the first era and cleared the field for Nintendo's first revolution. Market glut aside, the circumstances should feel familiar enough: as far as near everyone was concerned, videogames had hit a brick wall; there was simply nowhere further to take them. Then Nintendo came along with its new, intuitive control interface and emotionally intuitive software, and the market blossomed again, burning with new inspiration and direction. Then following a decade of elaboration on Nintendo's ideas, the industry hit another problem: it had brought 2D character-based games, in the mold presented by the NES, about as far as they would go.
Indeed, at that time we could have moved on to put more sprites on screen, and drawn them in a higher resolution still, aside from making the games prettier, the impact would have been minimal. At a certain point the law of diminishing returns kicks into effect, and each incremental adjustment becomes that much less perceptible or relevant as a measure of potential. That the Neo-Geo was sufficient to last for over fifteen years in a competitive arcade environment certainly seems illustrative. (That most people who buy HDTVs simply watch standard-definition programs stretched to 16:9, and don't seem to either know or care about the difference, should also get a person thinking.)
Apparently sensing this, and in turn straining to find a new future, press and analysts puttered for a few years with "virtual reality" and "multimedia" and optical media and voxels and polygons, before finally finding a combination that sort of worked, settling on an ugly compromise of 3D polygonal space interspersed with CG movies, mostly stored on optical discs. Since these were still videogames, and everyone's primary concern was how games might look different in comparison to Sonic the Hedgehog (or even Donkey Kong Country), Nintendo's old controller and design bible were retained however awkwardly they fit this new mongrel gamespace that had been birthed, with its new needs and potentials. In the short term, analog control smoothed things over a bit though it wasn't really until the Dreamcast and PS2 that this space became intricate enough to do much of merit with it.
Now, as of this waning generation and within these weird guidelines we've drawn, we are able to represent pretty much anything we want (including high-res 2D sprites) which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. It means we're at another standstill; basically the same one we suffered ten years ago, and ten before that. Save some sprinkles, what we've got is about as perfect as it'll get and yet there are still so many inherent problems and limitations to address: 2D controls and display, operating on a 3D space; the inadequacies of polygons as a construction material; issues like whether cutscenes even belong in a videogame, which seem more a facet of how we broadly interpret and act upon our role as audience than simply a software issue. Do we try to face these issues, or do we go off in another direction altogether to escape the current muddle or do we keep plodding ahead with our heads down, pretending that the medium and the industry as they are now are effectively immutable?
This is the awkward legacy we're left to scratch our heads over a clear trot back, yet an unsure and inelegant journey forward, forged more through improvisation and the odd shrug than by any grand map or mission. The question naturally arises: for all the power of intuition, by what measure are these solutions that we keep finding reasoned the "best"? When we identify or solve a problem, however obvious it might seem, how do we know that it is a problem and what does it mean for that problem to be solved?
On the most practical, business-oriented level, what's been going on is that the industry has thus far been driven by cyclical phases of growth and refinement driven by the introduction of new design fads, usually driven by new technology. One hardware generation is spent familiarizing the market with that technology and the design framework that it facilitates or suggests; a second generation cashes in on that familiarity, by delivering more and more sophisticated iterations of the technology and thereby more nuanced software to take advantage of it. Once the given hardware and software trends have reached their pinnacle of differentiation (after which the Law of Diminishing Return kicks in), their innate novelty begins to wane. The fads grow stale, the natives grow restless, and either a new fad kicks in to make the product line seem interesting again or... well, 1984. More or less.
The big issue here is the industry's current reliance on limited gimmicks be they new control devices or 3D polygonal space or appealing cartoon characters to drive sales and spur financial, creative, and audience growth. Fads will fade; gimmicks will wear off and as yet, the medium and the industry have yet to transcend gimmicks. When each reaches the point where creative expression and consumer interest can be reliably assumed without a forced schedule of proprietary maintenance, then each will be at a mature state. So long as the games that a person can make or play rely on the collective quirks of technology and business, videogames and the system guiding their development and delivery will remain in constant flux as they strive toward an as yet undetermined ideal.
So what is it we're trying to accomplish, with all of these generational shifts driven by gimmickry and dazzle yet necessary to keep the industry from stagnating? Maybe a good start is to look at what decisions we've collectively made in the past, and to try to pick apart the reasoning behind those choices.
When the NES came along, it introduced a slate of reforms broad and subtle enough that it's odd they aren't analyzed more closely more often. There's the price fixing, of course, and the "quality control" system that ensured more than anything supreme brand control on Nintendo's part, aiding in their marketing spin that portrayed the NES as a lifestyle unto itself. There's the decision to make the NES look like a random hunk of home video equipment, rather than a "game console" as such. There's the NES controller, which worked so well at what it did that for twenty years no hardware manufacturers have dared diverge from its essential template so well that almost nobody questions its ultimate efficacity as an input device. There's Miyamoto's storybook-influenced approach to the medium, which emphasized videogames as a storytelling platform. What's missing is how all of this junk adds together.
As with Pac-Man before it, the NES and its carefully managed stable of software was meticulously engineered to attract people who didn't care about "videogames" as such if by "videogames" you meant faceless contests of skill like Space Invaders and Centipede the sort of thing you'd find in dingy back rooms that mid-'80s adults were convinced were all drug dens (and hey, maybe a few were). By comparison, Super Mario Bros. was apparently full of redeeming value: an iconic, kid-friendly protagonist, bright colors, a long journey through a defined world that you could revisit as often as you wanted a world with its own rules that it gently taught you if you simply followed your own curiosity. It was an easy game to identify with on a human level: kids and adults and boys and girls all could enjoy it equally (so long as they were right-handed). Likewise, the controller made the game extremely simple to play: simply clutch the cross-pad with your off hand, and hit the action buttons when required with your primary hand. The game made sure you got used to it soon enough.
The game didn't play like a "video game", as people broadly understood the term, and its playing equipment the NES wasn't even sold as a traditional game console; it euphemistically referred to the NES as a "control deck", the controller as a "control pad" rather than a joystick, and cartridges as "game paks". As a result of the quality control such as it was it was ensured that, in those simple days before mainstream gaming press, a parent could easily pick up any game on the shelf that looked interesting, and it would confirm most of the reasons that family chose the NES to start with: reasonably well-made, vaguely culturally redeeming interactive tales that the whole family could (at least in theory) get behind. The NES pulled videogames out of the geek ghetto and made them acceptable (and maybe halfway interesting) dinner table discussion.
Flash forward to the mid-'90s. The Internet is starting to creep into the public consciousness, as pundits everywhere put William Gibson on a pedestal as a modern-day H.G. Welles for predicting the whole concept of cyberspace. Problem was, cyberspace was still just a media myth! Didn't stop Hollywood and TV Land from going tech ga-ga, though. Feed in recent advances in CGI special effects the morphing in Terminator 2 and that Michael Jackson video, and creature animation in Jurassic park animation of such sophistication that full-length features like Toy Story were just around the corner as well as mass storage media like CD-ROMs, huge enough even to store full-motion video, and the public imagination goes nuts. Oh yeah, and then there's Wolfenstein and Doom, blowing the cultural mind and proving once and for all that we're all only five years away from being Max Headroom.
So hey videogames! Now is the time to put away our toys, as the future is before us, and it's 3D just like real life! And it's sometimes got real people in it, just like movies! And look, we can afford SC workstations and render cutscenes that look just like Hollywood! Even if the game can't possibly look this good, it'll give you a good idea what that blob is that you're steering your stick figure toward. And hey now that we've got all this storage space, we need to fill it with something!
As it happened, all this nonsense fell on our heads at about the time that Nintendo and Sega were struggling to figure out what to do next how to up the ante. The wind was so strange, and things were happening so quickly, that when Rare chose to use a SGI workstation to render a few sprites and background elements (instead of merely drawing them by hand), people didn't understand that this wasn't some magical new 3D technique that the Super NES was able to achieve. People actually bought Night Trap, and thought Mortal Kombat was amazing because it had digitized actors in it. "VR parlors" opened up here and there around the country, allowing people to wander around in an inane 3D space and... not really do much. And everywhere, from all angles, each with their own agendas, the game industry was under pressure to break out of the cartoon world and do something adult; something that reflected the real world, in all its three-dimensional, gritty, realistic detail. People wanted the future and they wanted it now, and videogames were the medium to deliver it.
Step in one pissed off Ken Kutaragi, burning with rejection and ambition, to deliver where Sega and Nintendo were busy behaving like the regular cast of ABC's Lost. "Here's your friggin' future", Sony said, and flopped down an extremely generic, kind of cruddy piece of electronics that meant to do nothing except render 3D and stream cutscenes from a CD-ROM. It was expensive, yet not prohibitively so and significantly, it wasn't by either of those other bozos who represent the old face of videogames: the old order, who you can't rely on to deliver the future. Sony delivered what the culture wanted of videogames; it gave people ostensibly "adult", realistic entertainment that wasn't like what anyone associated with videogames before. The PlayStation was cool; it spoke to the Nintendo generation, now in its teens, and to all the MTV hipsters out there. It took the public's imagination by storm by promising a more familiar emotional experience one that fit into people's social lives in a way that Super Mario World could not. If the result is ten years of confusion, well. What you pull out of the crucible depends on what you put in.
The important point is that Sony succeeded for mostly the same reasons that Nintendo did a decade earlier if reflected through the funhouse mirror of mid-'90s tech hysteria. People were interested in the basic principle of videogames; it's just that what they knew as videogames no longer impressed them. Whereas the first era of videogames was perceived as the province of back-room weirdos and autistics, the second era was associated with childhood; with cartoon colors and mascots and Captain N and Fred Savage wearing a Power Glove. Videogames simply didn't seem as relevant or interesting as they did ten years ago. I know I, for one, stopped playing videogames for five years; they just didn't seem to be going anywhere and hey, I had important teenagery things to worry about.
The issue is pretty simple, really: what people want from videogames as from anythings they allow into their lives is for the medium to constructively contribute to their lives. At the same time, that seems plausibly the ultimate goal for the medium: to express something important and useful to its audience on at least some level. That level might be trivial as hell say, a sense of accomplishment at having achieved the top score in Space Harrier. Still, even the simplest or most fleeting emotion if honestly earned has its intrinsic value. It's just that the more trivial and narrow the contribution, and the more hard-earned it might be, then once you get past the novelty hump the narrower the potential absolute appeal to the means of delivery.
Identifiable characters, involving gameworlds, goals that involve more than simple reflexes, and a more casual method of input all result in a broader appeal than does abstract twitch gameplay with intangible goals. An identifiable sense of space and scale, more realistic scenarios, and familiar touchstones like voice acting and movie sequences result in a broader appeal (if not necessarily always for the right reasons) than a flat cartoon world with more abstract mechanics. Each new era has added something more tangible, more familiar to grab onto albeit largely to only one side of the scale.
See, videogames are a study of cause and effect; stimulus and response. The game provides a framework for action and stimuli to react to; the player reacts, affecting the gameworld. Each action on the player's part in some way changes the circumstances for each subsequent decision, resulting in a conversation between the player and game ideally a fluid, engaging, and inspiring one. If our ultimate goal is to expand the expressive potential of the medium the ability both for the games to communicate ideas and for their audience to be moved by their experiences with the medium then that means expanding the range and nuance of causal interaction between the game and the player.
Curiously, the vast majority of the additions since 1985 have been merely to the stimulus end; they've been concerned with presentation, adding new chunks to the visual and audio surfaces to lure people in. By comparison, there's been relatively little consideration for what people will do once they've been attracted. I'm not just talking about controllers NES pad or analog control or Wii remote though certainly they're a part of it. Just as significant is the way that people, and thereby culture, react to engage with videogames in the course of their normal lives.
There have been some superficial attempts at extending the utility of game consoles, generally through the Aiwa compact stereo approach: allowing users to play normal compact discs or DVDs on the machines. The famous side effect of this strategy, of course, is that zillions of people bought the PS2 simply to serve as a cheap DVD player. The result: for a long time, the best-selling piece of PS2 software in Japan was The Matrix. A bunch of people bought the razor; nobody was interested in buying blades. Although this did extend Sony's user base, the rationale has nothing to do with videogames, much less videogames adding to people's lives. Sony might just as well have packed a hundred million yen into each box so everyone who bought a PS2 would be rich. That would have been interesting, yet it wouldn't have said much about the PS2's merits as a game console. (It's telling that both Nintendo and Microsoft balked at making their last-gen consoles DVD-compatible out of the box; Unlike Sony, the electronics giant, that's simply not what business they were in.)
When I'm speaking about people's normal lives, I mean the part of their lives people spend waking up, eating breakfast, talking with their family, going to work, sitting on the train or bus, hanging out, coming home and helping kinds with the homework, exercising, making dinner, having sex, and going to sleep. You know life. If you want to know how to infiltrate people's lives, look at handheld games. Look at cell phones. If you think it's amazing that the Game Boy and the DS have done so well, you've never visited Japan where a person might literally spend half his waking day on the train. Commuting aside, both the Game Boy and DS are simple in their ways: durable and intuitive and convenient, the DS more so. Furthermore, the most significant DS software tends to focus on topics relevant to normal people (compared to insane videogame fans): keeping your brain fit, learning to cook, learning to be less awkward around people. There are still your Castlevanias and Mario games, of course just as 2D fighters and scrolling shooters will always be made so long as there's an audience. They're just not as important as they used to be. Or to be more precise, their importance has been put into perspective. As far as cell phones are concerned hey, who cares if the games are almost universally garbage. It should be self-evident the role their platform plays in people's lives.
Likewise, it should be self-evident why a person should bother to put in the (actually rather precious) energy to play a videogame. The lower the learning curve, the more flexibility to the player's input and the more appropriate the response from the game, the greater the obvious reward. As I often say, the worst thing a videogame can do is assume I've got nothing better to do with my life than play videogames.
When videogames fail to hit a balance when they fail to offer players a level of response roughly equal to the sophistication of the game's stimulus, and when they fill an important role in people's lives (or conversely when a game has relatively little to say despite all of the player's input which in practical terms is more a software issue) then the medium is, in effect, missing its target. The result is a narrowing and a limit in appeal (again with the shooters and fighting games), leading to a steeper "novelty hump" and once people are over that hump, the fad is over.
So now, as we again shuffle awkwardly from one era to the next, what are Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo doing to combat the hump? Or finer, what do they see as the current shape of the hump? Everyone seems to perceive some big problems with the medium as it stands. What I find telling is that, despite the often dramatically different approaches taken by the three companies, the reasoning behind their decisions seems extremely similar across the board suggesting that there's a broad, if implicit and vague, agreement about what needs changing.
Paramount seems to be an acknowledgment of the current social stigma to videogames. Brushing aside the hyperbole about games in Hollywood and videogames making more zillions of dollars than motion pictures and how many game consoles are out there today since we know that the actual percentage of American homes with a game console has not increased since the NES era videogames are about as much of a public joke as they've ever been. If anything, we've backpedaled over the last ten years or so.
Back when Nintendo and Sega were in charge, at least videogames had an inoffensive, marginally family friendly, socially redeemable overtone to them. Now the relationship between videogames and culture is nearly back to the early '80s. We're back in the "geek ghetto"; back then it was arcades as drug dens, and videogames themselves as a weird addictive force; today it's Columbine and murder simulators and Jack Thompson. Of course it's all nonsense though that doesn't mean there aren't reasons for the misunderstanding. If videogames can be vilified and picked apart, that means to the public eye that they have essentially failed to make their case. And if the value of videogames is only evident to the kind of freakos who hang out in videogame forums, then clearly they have failed in at least some aspect of their social mission.
The point, of course, isn't to make videogames immune to criticism; it's simply to account for the existing criticisms (or rather whatever might be buried between the lines), as concerns what social or personal human demands and needs might not be adequately addressed. To wit: Sony has decided to explore distributed computing, using online connected PS3s as a loose network, with the goal to explore important scientific and medical issues. (Very nice brilliant, even if beside the point.) Microsoft has chosen to engage new developers with its XNA system, hinting at the ideal that anyone should have the option to express his or herself through game development. (Extremely noble and indeed significant if extremely narrow.) Then there's Nintendo, with its Wii Channels. (Much less grandiose, though more broadly applicable on a personal level.)
All three systems are intended as "set-top boxes" of a sort, intended to serve a variety of functions within the household the implication that you're buying something far more significant to your life than just a game console. (As for how well and by what means they intend fulfill that promise, you may come to your own conclusions.) All may be (and are indeed focused around being) connected to the Internet, resulting in at least some sort of broader social connection.
In general, the key concern of the new generation seems to be to refute the suggestion that videogames are an inward-turned, alienating influence on a person's life. The assumption seems to be that it is unwise to expect that videogames are important in their own right, though if you can convince people that videogames serve a role in their real lives then perhaps they'll take the plunge. Microsoft has taken this idea of adapting to the user, rather than asking the user to adapt to you, to a curiously literal level, with its faceplates and custom soundtrack options for every Xbox 360 game. It's like Burger King's "your way, every day" theory the assumption being that people know what they want, and what they want comes out of a fashion magazine. Still, interesting.
Just as interesting is the focus on all three platforms on the downloading of "classic" and small-scale videogame content implying at least some intention on creating a sort of a "universal present" for the medium whereby past works are considered just as viable and significant, for their part, as current fare and indeed where modern games can be directly cross-referenced with their predecessors such that any advances (or lack thereof) are made readily apparent. Likewise, games that exhibit fascinating concepts yet which could never be trussed up enough to be considered major retail releases like Geometry Wars or Jenova Chen's Flow are given broad exposure, further facilitating the exchange of ideas.
This exchange of ideas between East and West; big and small developers; developers and the buying public; between players and other players; between players and their family seems to be another major guiding principle. When you tie it into the first point about broader social perception of the medium and the second, about making videogames more broadly applicable to people's lives, and you start to think about issues like the Wii remote (along with Sony's half-response, and to some extent the 360's wireless pad), it seems clear that the zeitgeist this time around is communication.
Though their approaches could hardly seem more different, in an interview with gamebrink.com Shigeru Miyamoto appears to speak for all three manufacturers: In order to truly draw people into a videogame, "it will be necessary to create a console that gives you the feeling that it's part of your daily life." Hardcore gamers will scoff, of course; their resistance to change, or even toward broadening the market, is notorious as is their paranoia that their favorite hobby is slipping away from them. On wii.com, Satoru Iwata addresses these fears again, with the voice of a generation:
It does seem that there is a level of misunderstanding among some people. I am concerned about this. It's true that Nintendo is reaching out to non-gamers, but this does not mean that we are ignoring game fans. I believe that if we don't make moves to get people who don't play games to understand them, then the position of video games in society will never improve.
So what does it mean today, to be a next-gen console? Same as it's ever meant, at a change of eras: taking another sharp turn to redress a perceived lack of balance, correcting any perceived inadequacies in the status quo. Bringing the medium one step closer to what it ideally can be, someday, when we're all bright and organized enough to know what needs to be done, and skilled enough to pull it off. We're not there yet we're nowhere near there, and no weight of new-fangled controllers or interfaces or display technologies will speed the way. We just have to take our time, and see what works, and keep our eyes open for hidden genius.
Still, looking at the current clash of opinions the startling progressiveness of Nintendo, next to the conservatism of Sony and the eagerness to please of Microsoft is a little frustrating. Imagine, if you will, where we'd be today if everyone were to communicate and compare notes, rather than play this dumb game of oneupsmanship. Imagine a videogame standards commission, headed by a board of dignitaries from all across, from all areas of the industry with focus, of course, on actual game designers formed with the mission and a detailed yet flexible long-term plan to refine the medium for the good of all. It's not impossible!
In fact, better than imagine it let's do it! The main difficulty will be convincing the big hardware manufacturers to relinquish some creative input over their own product. If measures are taken to ensure that everyone including small, quirky dissenting voices has significant input, and that all decisions are made following extensive discussion, and according to a certain irrefutable set of primary standards and ideals, I think it's plausible to convince reasonable figures like Satoru Iwata and Ken Kutaragi both visionaries in their own right of their own vested interest in such a proposition. As for American companies like Microsoft, hey, consensus is their middle name! Just look at the Xbox controller!
This idea isn't even a new one, in principle. If you recall, Trip Hawkins had the same thought at the last change of eras (to admittedly disastrous results). And look at Sony's attempt to rebrand videogames in its own name and image: when you boot up a PS3, the only time you see a PlayStation logo is when you choose to play a videogame (as compared to a Blu-Ray movie or DVD or compact disc or what-have-you). The implication is clear, as is Kutaragi's intent. He's a videogame fan; he's a die-hard gamer. He just wants what he loves. Though its effect is annoying, his desire is understandable enough.
The problem, of course, with the 3D0 and with Kutaragi's draconian unification attempt, is that the focus is all wrong: it's all on establishing a universal format, or a universal brand essentially on putting videogames into a single box, with an arrow pointing at it, when they've got so, so, so freaking far to go before the medium is even close to mature. What we need now isn't to limit ideas; it's to promote discussion. To that end, there's no good to an overseeing board like the one I'm proposing if the result would be stifling radical ideas like the Wii or the DS or heck, even the Virtual Boy in at least principle (if certainly not in execution). If such a board is to exist, it needs a built-in way to account for these kind of ideas in accordance with agreed-upon goals and principles for the medium.
Likewise, the end result of such a board would not necessarily be a universal format; especially in the short term, the board may well decide that the industry's best interest is in pursuing split paths that suggest equal potential. The goal in this case would be to ensure that each idea receives as much support as required to refine it to such a point that it stands as an acceptable representative of some key aspect of the board's guiding principles. Likewise, with everyone's ideas out in the open, it will be that much easier for third parties to understand and develop to the strengths of the hardware in question. There may even be loosely imposed guidelines to ensure equal and appropriate support for each given platform.
I think we're getting old enough that we can handle some cooperation. There have already been plenty of hints in that direction, what with Capcom and SNK's kinship, and Nintendo's farming out its franchises to companies as diverse as Sega and Namco and Capcom. Honestly, I don't think the industry can get much further unless we do band together and start watching out for all of our best interests. If we get ourselves in gear, then maybe in ten years we'll be in a place to make some deliberate, educated decisions about our collective future. Clichι as it might be, a united front is a strong front and we've got a hell of a lot to offer the world.
(November 17th, 2006 @ 03:38am)
.Touch Survival Kids
Lost in Blue feels a lot like Zelda 1. Same sense of constant danger, being stranded somewhere to fend for yourself. In Zelda the danger is mostly from monsters and things. Can't explore too far or they'll kill you. Have to work your way up. In Lost in Blue, the dangers are hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. I'm just gradually building myself up to explore further and further inland. I keep finding miraculous things like an empty glass bottle, washed up on shore, that lets me carry water with me. And long sticks, that I can fashion into spears. And logs, that I might be able to build something with eventually.
It's a lot like the treasures in Zelda, which you just sort of find, and which mostly seem special because they're something you found, that might help you, rather than because they're the key that unlocks the next door that lets you go forward (as in the later games). Though they might have that effect, It's not that direct.
I'm surprised the game doesn't make more use of the touchscreen -- even in the menus. Strange to have to actually press the start button when it says "PRESS START". And it's weird that you can't just dump stuff on the floor of your cave. It's not like the twigs would go anywhere. I can see a certain limit, like after a certain point the girl complaining that, what with her unable to see (you step on her glasses near the beginning), she's liable to trip if you clutter the place any more.
I found raspberries!
Castlevania is... there. It is what it is. It's another Castlevania. A pretty good one. I think my save file getting corrupted just soured me on everything. It was my own fault. I think I turned the system off while it was saving.
The first part of the game is wonderful. Then it gets boring. Then more boring. Then more boring. Then it gets better, then better, then more boring, then a little better. You actually aren't ever in The Castle, as such. Though when you're on the fringes of this mess of a hideout, things are much more well-defined. The level design is just really good in the first two sections of the game. And it looks interesting and has great music. The two towers are great. The best clocktower ever. And there are some great touches. In between, though...
The whole middle section is just monsters on shelves, that you cut through to get to the next room. It's weird, because there are such good parts on either end. It's like the level designers fell asleep for half the game. Maybe they just left the whole middle section open, figuring "we've got the outlines; we'll fill the rest in later." Then deadline approached, and they just went and scribbled in every middle square as quickly as they could. That the map is so well-conceived overall seems to support this impression.
I got disenchanted somewhere around the ballroom, and I don't think I ever quite recovered. A shame, considering how much good there is here.
(October 13th, 2005 @ 10:24am)
.Important Glossary of Terms
This is another unpublished article -- ostensibly a glossary for the end of a "New Games Journalism" anthology edited by Kieron Gillen, friend to all woodland creatures. It was to have been published by O'Reilly Media; as tends to happen, there was a management change and the new guy was no longer interested in the book. At least I got paid... in a check composed in pounds sterling, that my bank refused to cash. Hm. Well, here it is.
As few of our readers are likely familiar with the intricate jargon involved in videogame writing, I have been asked to compile a list of common words and phrases found throughout this volume. Although some of these words may look and may even sound familiar, a wise traveler takes caution when straying into unknown land; even an innocent gesture may find you on the wrong end of a dagger or the wrong side of a jail cell. Before acting on any of the advice contained prior, and certainly before laying judgment on the claims put forth in this text, please study the following index and integrate its contents into your daily routine.
NOTE: It may help to copy these terms out on a sheet of paper, and to repeat them daily. For those culturally blessed with right-handedness, try writing the terms with your left hand for added practice and agreement between both of your mental hemispheres. For those accursed to live in a world not designed for their grasp, wield your pen alternately to those before you.
A subjective form of communication that uses metaphor to suggest a vast yet implicit web of common understanding between two parties, often on a subconscious or an unconscious level.
Anathema to the Gamer.
In a videogame context, the in-game character or object that represents the player. In the cases where the avatar is anthropomorphic, it usually takes the form of a hyper-masculine adult male or a woman wearing three square inches of clothing. More recently, Japanese games have replaced the former archetype with an androgynous (or even hyper-feminine) male lead. This is all more comprehensible when you understand the intimate bond between a player and her on-screen persona. The player's avatar becomes, in a sense, her closest companion on her lengthy journey through the gameworld. Especially in a modern 3D adventure, it is important to find an avatar whose ass the typical player will enjoy watching for hours at a time.
Every medium is a study of specific properties of the human experience. Sculpture is a study of form; music, a study of tone. Videogames are a study of the relationship between cause and effect. That is to say: where videogames exist, experientially, is in the feedback loop between the player and the gameworld. The player acts upon the gameworld, and is given a response (or lack of one). This response then becomes the basis for further reaction. It is this ping-pong communication with one's environment that defines the medium.
The goals set before the player mean relatively little unless the player has opposition to overcome in order to fulfill those goals; any screenwriter or novelist could tell you that. This opposition might take the form of a snarling man with a mustache, a lack of communication between brothers, or a lingering sense of guilt over a past deed. Conflict is the manner in which opposition is addressed. In a videogame, the solutions to the above problems would be to stab the man with the mustache, to stab your brother, then to fire a laser-guided missile at your guilt. Metaphorically, perhaps.
In most videogames, violence is the major or sole source of conflict. As every videogame must sustain player interest for fifty hours or more, each requires an parade of weak and generically evil characters to kill. These are known as your enemies. An enemy can be easily discerned from a non-combative NPC in that any evil entity will hurt, kill, or infect the player's avatar on contact.
This design philosophy has its roots in early drafts of the Christian Bible, in which Jesus preached social paranoia and an ethical code based in Darwinism. (These sections were later revised in part, from fear of alienating Southern Baptist ministers.) These teachings were later adopted as a social code during the Reagan administration, during which videogames initially flourished.
In life, experience is accumulated through keen observation, trial and error, and persistence. A person's accumulated experience is the context from which she can derive meaning from the events that make up her life, and from which artistic communication is made possible. Although these events will call on a limited number of templates, it is the way the elements are balanced that gives us each our unique perspective.
In videogames, experience is accumulated by exiting your town borders and stabbing bunny rabbits. You can tell how much experience you have gained by the numerical tally in your sub-menu. With enough experience, you will advance to the next level (of advancement) and possibly learn fire magic.
Doesn't exist. See Liberty.
An objective term for the liberty allowed within a given gameworld; the things that a game lets you do, and therefore the elements that make up the player's potential. Often misapplied to mean how a game feels to play whether the jumping seems solid, whether attacking is satisfying. Those are mechanical issues. This is just about potential: what you can, hypothetically, do.
On an even keel with graphics, and far more important than sound or replay value.
Creatures whose personal identity is rooted in a lifestyle built around videogames. Typically conservative, defensive, and isolationist in attitude especially when it comes to videogames, especially the particular videogames in which they are most deeply invested.
Notable subspecies: Hardcore Gamers, Retro Gamers, Obscure Gamers, PC Gamers, Console Gamers, Fighter Fans, RPG Fans, Shooter Fans, Technophiles, Wilson's Golden Band-Rumped Gamer.
The artificial space given to the player to navigate, including all of its rules, logistics, background, and inhabitants the way all of these elements cohere to form a tangible place that's the gameworld. Pac-Man's gameworld is limited to an endlessly-repeating blue maze filled with ghosts who re-spawn in their central nest, corridors lined with cookies, and the occasional bouncing piece of fruit. Shenmue's gameworld is a limited recreation of a mid-'80s Japanese suburb where you never have to eat, where the kids all want to wrestle, and where people actually know whether or not they saw a black car on the day that the snow turned to rain.
A gameworld is largely defined by the liberty allowed the player; its verisimilitude, however unrepresentative it might seem of the "real world", relies mostly on not suggesting any more possibilities than it actually allows. Once the player starts to question why a reasonable option is unavailable to him say, stepping over a line of police tape or walking down a corridor blocked off by an invisible wall the illusion is shattered. In its abstraction, Pac-Man has a highly believable gameworld; few would question, for instance, why the player can't merely jump over the maze walls.
A term used by gamers and game journalists to refer to the visual presentation of a gameworld. The implication is that boiling down a game's appearance to an objective-sounding term will allow an easy (perhaps even numerical!) assessment of worth. Old games, like the original Legend of Zelda, have bad graphics. New games, like the newest car racing or Madden game, have good graphics. Unless they don't map enough mips or buffer enough Zs, that is.
Alongside gameplay, one of the two most important review criteria.
The means through which a player may interact with the gameworld. Interfaces have both a physical and a design component: physically, you have the means through which commands are entered (a control pad, joystick, power glove); by design, the player is given feedback through a display device. For example, the game tells you to hit "A" to open a menu. You press the "A" button on your controller. This brings up the menu, which gives you further information to inform future actions. An interface is the objective aspect of the cause-and-effect relationship between player and game. The subjective aspect is known as mindspace.
Liberty is freedom within bounds. Or, perhaps, the illusion of freedom. According to most codes of ethics, a person has liberty to do much as he choose so long as he not negatively interfere with the liberty of another. As conscious creatures, we have the liberty to do whatever our psychology, our circumstances, our physical laws allow which in the end is not very much. You can pick the 2% or the skim milk, but in a sense the decision is already determined by your nature, by every event of your life to that point however inconsequential it might seem, and by factors completely outside of your control (mostly relating to the liberty of others). Even your standing at the cooler door, making up your mind, is the inevitable outcome of prior events.
Though you may have no true freedom, you have full liberty to do what you will within the means and situation provided you. Though your decisions may objectively be preordained, you subjectively have the option to choose whatever path you wish. The same is true of every gameworld. Although Liberty City may allow you a broader scope of options than Pac-Land, both offer the same liberty within the narrow box handed you. If a game has strong verisimilitude, the bounds of your liberty will never occur to you and you will simply accept the world as it is given.
In real life we have laws physical laws, social laws, ethical laws. Instead, videogames have mechanics. In theory, mechanics exist to define the boundaries and establish the potential of a gameworld. In reality, ninety percent of all game mechanics exist to make one genre piece distinguishable from another.
On its own, a videogame is just a collection of code burned into an optical disc or some other storage medium. Videogames are, in a sense, pure ideas. There is no physical element to them. Further, a tremendous background of technology and service is required to experience a videogame. All of this investment exists to create an absorbing mindspace for the end player. The mindspace between player and game is where a videogame actually takes place; where a player serves as protagonist to his own gameworld experience, according to the liberties alloted him by the game mechanics. The greater the verisimilitude of the gameworld, the more easily a player's mindspace is retained. Mindspace is the purely subjective component of the cause-and-effect relationship between player and game; the objective component is known as the game interface.
The manner in which a story is told. In film, narrative is a facet of editing and framing. In a videogame, narrative comes from playing. Asteroids does have a story, as far as it has a narrative. It happens to be a story of a lone space ship and its ultimately doomed goal to clear the space around it of dangerous space rocks. The particulars come in the telling that is, in the playing. How long the ship lasts, how well it does, what close calls it has, are all up to the player.
The greater the scope of liberty allowed a player, the more undefined the narrative.
A non-player character is an actor on the stage who is strictly controlled by the script, rather than by a human mind. In effect, an automaton placed within the gameworld to give it the appearance of population outside the player. Sort of creepy. Generally considered distinct from an enemy, in that NPCs are given the illusion of personalities and lives of their own, whereas enemies only exist to be evil. NPCs are typically a barrier to verisimilitude, in that both by nature (as living props) and by technological limitation, they will never behave in a completely believable manner.
Life is but a stage, and we are all players.
latent possibility. The greatest achievement of verisimilitude is the suggestion of endless potential within a given world the sense that anything could be out there, that you can do anything you want, that a miracle is just around the corner.
The illusion of reality, which in most cases is achieved through not giving the audience cause to question the reality at hand. Postmodernism gets some of its kicks though turning verisimilitude on its head and bringing conscious attention to the seams of a given work. On its own terms, though, this is just another level of reality, with its own layer of verisimilitude. For a work to succeed, we need to believe in it somehow, even if that belief is a belief that we shouldn't believe in it at all.
Different from suspension of disbelief, as with enough verisimilitude disbelief won't even enter the picture.
The only important form of videogame conflict, violence involves the malicious harm of, or the intent to harm, another being. Violence can be overt and physical; some figures like Mohandas Gandhi more broadly interpret it as any negative effect, however inadvertent, one person might suffer at another's hands. Jean-Paul Sartre sees human communication itself as a form of violence; merely by interacting with another, we cause damage on some level, for both parties. Given that the entire nature of videogames is a study of communication, perhaps this says something.
Videogame violence is of a literal variety: one character brandishes a blade, and attacks the next. Oddly, although violence both forms and resolves nearly every videogame conflict, it is rare that videogames explore the repercussions of violence. Ethically, it is perfectly fine for the player to shoot ten thousand soldiers in order to save a single comrade, because the enemy soldiers are not real. They have no lives, no personalities, no bearing on the gameworld. They are simply evil incarnate, much like the "Communists" and "Terrorists" of American history. Perhaps intrinsically, the only force that matters in a gameworld is that of the player, and if the player is to continue feeding quarters, or is to feel generically satisfied with his fifty-dollar purchase, a videogame must encourage the player to feel not only justified but victorious in his actions. This is the state of videogames today.
Special thanks to Tim Rogers, Brandon Sheffield, Shepard Saltzman, Andrew Toups, Amandeep Jutla, Thom Moyles, James Freeman Rinehart, and Christian Culbertson. And to Agnes, for putting up with all my nonsense.
(October 13th, 2005 @ 01:15am)
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