Monthly Archives: July 2004

On the role of role

  • Reading time:5 mins read

See. The big advance in FFX, as far as the series goes, is in narrative and all that it relates to. The game system underneath is just the same as always — one that leads you to dissect it in such a way as you do; to think about its characters and overall world in Pokemon terms. Some of the relative sophistication is dulled by holding back and masking the player’s involvement with Game, lowering the relationship between player and character to trainer and racing pony.

That ain’t a healthy relationship. It’s akin to the horce-race coverage of local elections that you will see on the news. The point isn’t who’s ahead, and what numbers they can come up with; the point is the issues at stake, that have a broad or specific effect upon us, upon our world.

What is required here is a whole shift of our frame of reference, of our expectations.

The question is, what specifically or generally might illustrate a place to shift it.

As far as the relationship of a character and his world, I like the image of Shenmue, crossed with the likes of Elder Scrolls or Fable. On a level.

How, then — to take that as-is, for the moment — to integrate this with a game system, game world like those in FFXII? What else would be required? To strip away the mask that numbers and statistics and superimposed gimmicks present, and to put yourself in the position of the characters you control and face, what is missing? This is a subtle question; it deals with psychology more than anything. What do we need, to make our lives meaningful, comfortable, believable? What is real, what is false, on an internal level, and why?

The challenge is to come up with some framework which will allow the player to directly channel whatever the answers might be, without the architecture getting in the way, emotionally. This is not a matter of simply taking away the superficial elements that you happen to enjoy, but to be rid of the very reasons why you would want to prop yourself up with them. I’m pretty sure, were such a thing to exist, you would have no reason to lament the loss of the system; rather, when presented with the alternative, you would be wondering why you had been leaning on it for so long.

Me, I don’t have the answers. I’m just watching.

Thing is: if you go back to the origin of these systems, the pen-and-paper RPG, and you play the game correctly, the stats stand in for abstract or complex ideas: how much damage a person can take before dying, and how likely he is to hit a monster; values and properties that would otherwise be difficult to keep track of. The purpose of these statistics is to enable everyone concerned to deal with complex situations and conflicts, which might arise during play. The intended focus is upon the interaction amongst the players: upon picking a role, and thinking within it and within the world presented to you by the narrator — the DM. An RPG is about exploring an alternate life. The rules do not dictate; they empower.

This is, of course, not how people always play it; for many people, the organizational system — a tool which exists to make the experience easier to manage — has become confused with the game itelf, transforming the system into a bureaucratic trap, and the process of playing an unhealthy exercise in tunnel-vision. And that’s the whole problem we’re discussing.

These systems are a convenience; they only exist, in principle, to enhance the core ideals at stake in the experience. If the systems are no longer doing their job correctly, then let’s find a new structure that will work with contemporary technology to address those ideals; that will be a tool instead of a distraction, once more.

The question is raised: “If, however, you remove all of the systems that people have come to associate with the RPG, will a game still be recognizable as such?”

I think so. Again, it all depends on burrowing back down to the essence of what an RPG is trying to illustrate. If it’s there, people will feel it.

A decent comparative model might be our definitions for different genres of fiction: tragedy, comedy, farce. Each of these has a specific definition, which tends to be tied to a certain combination of defined human emotions and certain models of human behavior, desire, and ambition. The colors can be combined in any way you desire, clearly; such is the manner of life.

Nevertheless, there are certain keys to the RPG which are not present in the shooter, in the (closely-related) adventure game, in the platformer. There are certain real human traits that these genres exist to placate, stir, or simply acknowledge. It might be helpful to dig up what these are, if we are to do much of human meaning with this medium. Then we can build with them.

Actually.

I think I have hit upon why videogames remain an immature form of expression: the focus remains generally upon the method of execution rather than the underlying themes.

In other media, genres are generally classified in terms of what they have to say about life. In videogames, genres tend to be broken down by the actual game mechanics — by the process, rather than the goal. This is rather a shortsighted approach, akin to the way one sees life as a child.

I think this is something to revise, someday.

[For more discussion, see this thread.]

Missing Pieces

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The message I get from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is: “Hey, we’re making a movie and we’re totally basing it on a Charlie Kaufman script. Isn’t that trippy? Isn’t that cool?”

The message I get from the supplementary material is “Oh my god, George Clooney is such a great director! He has, like, ideas and stuff! He doesn’t even give himself more takes than the other actors!”

I am sure this is all true.

First-Place Pathos

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The success music in Excitebike is oddly touching.

This seems to come mostly from the interval between notes three and four. Or perhaps it’s just the leap up to the third note, and the need to resolve that somewhere. Yet, what an unusual place to resolve.

To then resolve that measure into the syncopated riff of measure two — well. There’s something going on here.

After that point, Hip Tanaka just winds the piece up into a crisp, early-NES victory burble. That part is disposable.

The first part, though:

There is some sense of victory, or weak recognition of joy — yet it comes through a conflicted filter. Even winning is not enough to heal the deep emotional wounds our heroic racer has faced. Now it is time for him to walk off into fate and the sunset, his mission complete. We will never see him again — though sometimes, when the smell of nitro arrives on a summer breeze, we shall remember.

Someone remix it for me, please, and bring this quality out.

Mega hurt

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Jesus, Megaman 3 is hard.

…

Despite the uninspiring music and level design, and second-class boss design, I might have a higher estimation of the game were I able to beat a level or two. Maybe once, in fourteen years.

A criticism often levied against the second game — indeed the only frequent one I hear — is that it is too easy. Usually it’s the hardcore assholes who lay the claim, although other, less hardcore, sometimes not-at-all-assholes sometimes agree. I have always found the US version of the game at just the right level: tough enough to hold my attention, while forgiving enough that I can play the damned thing.

As regards the follow-up, I just don’t understand the appeal here. Were the game itself rewarding enough to drive me through the frustration, that would be fine. Megaman III, though, makes me feel even worse than when I play Ninja Gaiden III. At least the latter game is such a bizarre failure that I am compelled by a dark curiosity. Megaman III isn’t so charming as to be poor. It’s just dull. Way too dull to be way too hard. It seems to expect me to bring my own baggage: to play it, and like it, just because I played and liked its predecessor.

Then, I have never enjoyed Streets of Rage II as much as the first game. I feel Sonic 2 loses a lot of the appeal of the original. I don’t enjoy King of Fighters 2000 or ’97 nearly as much as the chapters to which they are mere upgrades. Perhaps the game is just too polished for my tastes. Perhaps the implicit inertia in its design and execution offends me on some level that I cannot justify in rational terms.

Or perhaps I’m just not hardcore enough.

I guess I can live with that.

The Shooting

  • Reading time:4 mins read

In a sense, the interaction in a shooter is about the most basic interaction available in the medium. You reach out and touch your environment by sending out a “ping”; a probe. As you mention, the shooter is the original videogame — starting with SpaceWar. Even Pong operates on a similar principle, really. It’s just… backwards, kind of, in that the “bullet” is coming toward you, and you’re trying to catch it. (I don’t quite like this model as much.)

All through the medium, shooting more or less equates to exploration. In Metroid, you test the walls, and get a feeling for your environment, by shooting at them and it. In Asteroids and Centipede, your shooting shapes the very gameworld.

It was something of a revolutionary leap to switch away from this mechanic in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. — that whole thread that I was mumbling about before. In that model, you’re no longer pecking at the environment from afar but personally running around and punching and gobbling and jumping through it. Sort of interesting to tie this into what I was saying earlier. Not sure how it all goes together.

…

Mizuguchi went back to a rail shooter for Rez for a reason: he wanted a clean slate; to strip away all of the junk we have piled on top of the medium for the last few decades, and make the most basic videogame he could, that would still be palatable to a contemporary audience. There’s nothing more basic than a shooter. This is ground one, for videogames. Everything else is built on, or exists in rebellion against, this mechanic. Mizuguchi then tried to find just how much he could express with this mechanism — to show, in part, that it’s not the game system which necessarily drives a game, on an artisic, on an emotional level. Also, just to show how much can be said with how little — and thereby to ask why we have come to tend to express so little with so much.

This is why I like Rez — just the whole way it disassembles our whole notion of the videogame, and shows how it might be used more well than it has been.

I’m really curious what his next step might be.

Parts of the above, combined with parts of what I said about Gradius V

POWER IS… LOSING CONTROL… UWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I would still like to be able to duck, in Morrowind.

I mean. There are two buttons mapped to the menu. There is both an action button and an action-after-you-have-drawn-a-weapon-or-readied-a-spell button. That’s kind of a waste. You can save two buttons there. Put attack on the face action button, and put, say, duck on the trigger. Then allow me to put run on the other face button, so I am not forced to use analog, if I do not wish. As it is, I keep finding myself running when I do not mean to. It will feel better, to my sensibilities, if running is turned into a conscious decision, rather than just a side effect of trying to get somewhere. Or if I have that option, anyway.

I further wonder why both the left stick and the D-pad move the character. Yet more repetition! Yet more waste! Why not allow the player to map four different functions to the pad!

So. Here is my idea of a (fully remappable) control scheme — some of which would entail altering the game mechanics somewhat:

Left stick: character movement (with an analog on/off function)
Right stick: camera movement
Left trigger: jump
Right trigger: ready shield
A: action
B: run
X: sneak
Y: menu (notebook would be included here)
White: use item 1 (equipped on belt, say)
Black: use item 2
D-pad left/down: ready spell
D-pad right/up: ready weapon
Start: pause/save/load
Back: rest
L-stick click: duck
R-stick click: camera change

Yes. This would be nice.

The cat, at some point since last I was in the living room, turned on the PS2 by itself. Somehow.

Again with the objectivity

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On a certain level, you could argue that Super Mario Bros. signalled one of the most drastic changes to the superficial in the history of videogames.

>That’s only true if you fully accept the maxim that All That Is Important Is Gameplay, defining all other aspects of presentation and style as “superficial”.

No, it isn’t.

Super Mario Bros. introduced a bevy of new(-ish), and useful, gameplay concepts. It introduced little new in terms of character or story, over games that had existed long before.

The most significant problem that the game fleshed-out into the form we see it now, is the one first popularized in Pac-Man: preference for a rigid pre-established world template, to explore and master, over a more complex series of dynamics, as in, say, many of the earlier works of Ed Logg, where the player’s actions determine the nature of the gameworld, and thereby the future of the game.

I’m being simplistic, sure. There are plenty of counter-examples you could find, were you so inclined, of previous games with this structure. There is plenty you could provide to argue that this concrete storybook objectivenesss was the direction that games were moving in anyway, or that this is where they always sat. And for that matter, Super Mario Bros. is not so much a culprit here as is the whole design culture that it insipired. But there you go. Super Mario Bros. more or less shaped the modern videogame. Most of what exists now does because of the concepts in that game.

Of course, this is how games became popular. First Pac-Man, then Super Mario Bros. You give something obvious to latch onto, emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s a natural creative impulse. I just kind of wish that games had gotten a little further before this objective quality took over, overriding so much potential for abstract potentiality.

…

This is also, to a certain extent, why I so dislike the Super NES, and why the Zelda series has been a bore to me after the second game. I just wish developers would quit giving me overt toys to play with, within a specific framework — action figures and playsets — rather than a framework where my presence actually makes a difference.

I would like to matter.

Don’t Fear the Leaches

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Gemstone indeed seems to be rather smarter than Gladstone was — at least, toward the end of its second run.

Beyond the format and title reorganization (with the two premiere comics — $crooge and WDC&S — for the fans, the two standard titles — Mouse and Duck — for the casual newsstand audience, and the digest — DDA — for the impulse, give-to-the-kid-to-shut-him-up-for-a-few-hours market), they seem to acknowledge how to organize the material itself.

I tried to find a few Gemstone books for Free Comic Book Day. Hard task. They don’t seem to have all that great a distribution, as yet. Although, oddly, I kept finding posters with the classic cover to Barks’s one Mouse title, “The Riddle of the Red Hat”. Offhand, that seemed a strange choice. Even stranger if Gemstone’s comics aren’t actually available. The best I could find was the DDA digest — which, when surreptitiously removed from its folded-over comic bag, revealed itself to contain nothing but throwaway Italian Duck fare. I think the highest-grade was the likes of Scarpa. Basically filler. Kind of disappointing, as I was expecting some really long adventure tales (as the title, and the history of its use, would tend to suggest).

The Virgin Megastore, however, yielded a special Gemstone promotional issue, designed specifically for Free Comic Book Day. On the one side, Mouse. On the other, $crooge. Inside, a subscription card. Curious.

Further research reveals that the contents include the first (of only three) Barks encounters between $crooge and Glomgold and, indeed, “The Riddle of the Red Hat”. Although initially disappointing, as I was on a hunt for Rosa — or at least Van Horn — and I already have the entire Carl Barks Library in both hardbound and album form (trading cards included) — I began to realize that this was probably intentional.

In the Gemstone books I have read thus far, I have seen not a single Barks story — strange, in a sense, as even with the multiple full printings of his run, Gladstone had a tendency to reprint his work at every opportunity (to the point that it began to drive me nuts). Then again, Gemstone has a lot of Rosa and Van Horn to catch up on — as well as Jippes and some other B-plus-level writers and artists.

It’s more than that, though. As I prove on my hunt, new Rosa and Van Horn work is book-pushing material. This is the headliner stuff. On one level, Gemstone isn’t going to blow it on a promo issue, when they can use it to sell some of their major titles. On the other hand, Barks has been done to death. There is no need for him in the major titles except in a severe content draught. For a promo, though? Well. The rules are different.

I get the impression that this issue has a much wider distribution than the normal comics. Gemstone wants to pull in readers; to get out the message that they are around, and that Disney comics are being published. What better way to do this than with a two-way issue, including both the Mouse — which people associate with Disney, even if his comic life has been mostly uneventful save some refitted Godfredson serials — and $crooge, who is really the star of Disney comics, to anyone who knows a thing about them. Draw them in with the icon, and get them reading the real material.

Further, what better introduction to $crooge than Barks? And what better Barks story than an eventful one, such as his first meeting with his arch-nemesis, Glomgold? It’s also a rather poignant story. There is also the possible nostalgia factor, where old readers might be attracted by a new glimpse of “The Good Duck Artist”, from years ago. The only question now is what halfway-interesting Mouse material is available? There really isn’t much, again, unless you care to reprint a Phantom Blot serial — which would both look sloppy and be way too long. Unless, perhaps, you remember that one short Mouse tale that Barks did. It’s something of a rarity. You really only see it turn up once every decade, if that. Not a bad opportunity, this, to drag it out again.

So if Barks is promotional material, and Rosa and Van Horn are headline material, then what’s with all of the mediocre material in the DDA books? Simple: It’s a place to put it. No real use putting high-interest content in a digest, which you generally put by the toilet or throw in the back of a car. This is not high-concentration material. These books exist to fill time. So, in a sense, they are just asking for filler. The comparative junk that, in previous eras, would have cluttered the main books and caused nasty letters, is perfect fare here.

Gemstone is starting to remind me of Playmore.

I see this as a good thing.