by [name redacted]
This year’s final IGDA San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter meeting – held Tuesday, the sixth of December at the Sony Metreon’s Action Theater in San Francisco – featured three representatives from Industrial Light + Magic and two from LucasArts. The assembled personages spent an hour discussing how, thanks to their new joint facility in San Francisco’s Presidio district, they can share resources more easily than before.
So.
* Zelda 1 and 2.
* Dragon Quest in general.
* Riven.
* Shadow of the Colossus.
* Metroid II.
* Half-Life 2.
* Phantasy Star II.
* Metal Gear Solid 3, in particular.
* Lost in Blue.
* OutRun.
There is a common thread to all of these. It has to do with the gameworld, and the player’s method of interaction with it.
Stacking boxes to make your own path or eating the parrot in Half-Life and Metal Gear are the same as the magic wand in Zelda 1 or the structures in Wanda that serve no apparent purpose except to look at them, climb on them, stand on them, ponder about them. Building a spear in Lost in Blue is the same as gaining that level or buying that copper sword in Dragon Warrior, as finding a heart container or a boomerang in Zelda, as making that leap of logic in Riven, about that device halfway across the island.
The technique names in Phantasy Star are the same as the number system in Riven, as the clues in Zelda, as the Erdrick lore is in Dragon Warrior, as the artifacts are in Lost in Blue. And these are the same as the boxes and the parrot and the spear and the boomerang.
These are all different approaches toward the same, or similar, ideals. Player progression relies on personal growth and curiosity. Within its own laws, the gameworld is responsive to nearly all actions allowed the player. There is a strong focus on trial and error. On exploration on both the micro and macro levels. On pushing the limits of the gameworld to see what happens, and maybe being punished half the time. On intuitive leaps of reasoning, within the given laws. On patience. On innate appreciation of the intangible within a greater scheme.
The laws and structure of the gameworld are a framework filled with an open question. Rote progression is never a problem, and yet the purpose never particularly lies in the plot. Or in completion. Any story, any imposed goals are simply excuses. MacGuffins. They’re there to get you out the door. To give you an anchor, a point of reference. Maybe a path to walk down. The real joy, the really important material, comes in the unimportant treasures of providence provided by the player’s presence in the gameworld, by interfering as an outsider in a self-contained system.
The player, as Link in the first Zelda in particular, is not particularly meant to traverse Hyrule. He has no weapon. He has no defense. He has no health. There is no path specifically laid out for him, and yet there is a certain logic to be exploited — inconsistently, though consistently enough. At no point does the game call for the boomerang, or the wand. The game can probably be beaten without the sword, if the player is so inclined. Yet the tools are there to be made use of.
The world of Riven is alien to the player, and presents a barrier at every turn — and yet there is a logic behind it all; a reason why everything is where and as it is. As an outsider this lack of familiarity is an initial barrier. Later that same outside perspective and status puts the player in a rarified position. The simple joys of Riven come again from a whimsical turn of that same relationship with the gameworld — from sitting on a sun-baked stone stairwell, listening to the birds and the insects and the surf below. Imagining the coolness of the shadows and the moss on the stones. Appreciating what would go unappreciated were the player to belong here. Finding one’s own treasure in a broader system.
And yet none of these games are wholly open. Unlike Morrowind or Fallout or Baldur’s Gate, there is a clear and immediate structure. There is a limit to the options available to the player. The rules and the logic of the worlds are all simple and compact. There are only so many actions. There are only so many items. There are only so wide a world, so many levels, so many set pieces, so much of a variance in direction. There is a specific ultimate task before the player, a specific direction to move in. Save the princess. Learn about these Biomonsters. Figure out what’s going on in this world. Defeat the Metroids. Survive and maybe escape. Defeat the Colossi.
The secret to success in all cases is in understanding the reasoning of the gameworld, and the method of understanding — as in life — is experimentation. It is in the quirks, the exceptions, the trivialities — that with no clear explanation — that the searching mind finds the most wonder and curiosity. And it is in these quirks that such a mind imbues the most meaning, specifically for their lack of meaning, their lack of purpose. Their lack of structure, and all it implies about the gameworld and the player’s presence within it.
It is in these imperfections that we find beauty and we find reality. In which humanity and therefore something we identify as truth shows itself. In which we see hints of a structure or a randomness beyond our comprehension, that is greater than us, that is greater than our mission and yet that leads us to our fate. It is here that we find significance, that we find meaning, that we find verification for our continued efforts.
It is this which drives us on.
I don’t think anyone’s saying that there isn’t human potential to videogames. It’s just that they aren’t really living up to that potential yet. Even in the best cases. Give ’em a couple of decades.
Ebert hasn’t spent much time with them. He hasn’t really thought about them. Freeman’s basically on mark in saying the problem is, we don’t really have the vocabulary down.
I responded to Ebert, telling him that although he was essentially right as far as he went with his argument, he was a little off base in what he was using to judge. He says the main problem with videogames is that they ask for user input, so there isn’t any “authorial control” to them. Well, sure there is. The control is, as with film or novels, in the rules that the fictional world goes by. The difference is really just in what the different media study.
Film is about the juxtaposition of imagery over time, and what that can do to us. Videogames are about cause and effect, and what that ultimately can do to us.
The reason most videogames are kind of trivial right now is that few games really bother with the idea of consequences. I don’t even necessarily mean within the gameworld itself, although in some cases that could be a good step. I just mean emotional consequences. Given that almost all videogames are based on physical violence, you can see how they’re a little hard to take seriously.
This is the problem with the whole “videogames are supposed to be fun!” argument. Not really. Videogames are supposed to elicit some kind of emotion in the player. It’s the quality of that emotion which the medium and indeed the game must be judged on. That, and the elegance with which the emotion is elicited.
This is not to imply that every videogame must be “serious” — meaning Important or Dark or Thoughtful or Artsy or what-have-you. Or that most should be. Or that any should be, really. I still can’t bring myself to play killer7 because the beginning annoyed me so much. I’m just saying that they should try to be a little more human, is all.
Ideally, every videogame offers us a unique perspective of the Way Things Are. The way life works. What the rules are, what the possibilities are.
Are there any videogames out there that revolve around the bizarre way rules work when you’re a child? I don’t mean the invisible walls that don’t let you explore that part of a level just “because I said so”. I mean all of the little lies and half-truths and simplifications that are handed to us, either to get us to obey or to shut up or to mask that our parents don’t really know the answer — or just to toy with us. What about a game that explores that world, and the fear that comes along with potentially violating a rule by accident. The fear that comes with being called in that certain tone of voice, even if you don’t remember doing anything bad.
There are so many interesting things to explore. Instead we’re mostly just collecting trinkets and shooting things. See something, shoot it, get points. Cause and effect. We’ve still yet to progress past Space Invaders.
I guess maybe the reason I like older games so much, especially things like scrolling shooters and fighting games, is how honest they are. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, between the RPG explosion and the SNES and 3D and full-motion video, things have gotten kind of distracted. There’s this idea that videogames are better than they ever have been, that because people have (in some cases) learned how to put together the old pieces rather more competently than before, we’re at the heights of the craft and the art of game design. It’s all inbred bullshit. A group hug about how great Videogames are for their own sake. It’s a lie, like William Gibson’s computer-generated pop stars. Or like pop music as a genre and an industry, really.
Everyone’s been so busy looking down that something’s gotten lost and no one’s much noticed: the justification for any of this shit being here to begin with. Why are we doing this? Why are we playing videogames? Why are they being made? The only answer is that it’s because they’re videogames!
…
Now. This is real, and it’s a real problem. Most people just don’t have a name for it yet. They don’t know how to describe it. The industry’s getting restless. People are always complaining about sequels and about EA and about lack of good IP. Japan’s gaming industry has been imploding for a while. People keep predicting crashes. People keep talking about how jaded they’re getting, and about how much better videogames used to be. To shrug off any of that, no matter how much you might be thrilled with things as they are now, is pretty hard to excuse.
For all the talk about how healthy the industry is, how much money it’s making, as a percentage of the population videogames have exactly the same market saturation they did twenty years ago, during the NES era. There’s just more on the market, and the people who buy videogames are getting older and buying more. New people aren’t really playing videogames. And if they are, they’re doing it at about the same rate as existing players grow disillusioned.
…
If modern videogames tend to take the player for granted, I guess it’s because they take videogames for granted. Everyone does, really. Videogames are videogames. They’re Mario and Pokemon and Grand Theft Auto and everything we’ve ever seen. That’s all kind of poisonous. It’s best we just put it out of our heads. Those are examples of what has been done with videogames. Most of them are very well-done, for what they are. They’re just sketches, though. Videogames can be so much more interesting. So much more relevant. To see how, don’t look at videogames; look into yourself. Look at your life. Look around your town. Look at the news. Society. Look at why you like anything. Look at what makes Catch-22 such a great work and not just a funny story about World War II.
For those of you have attained enlightenment from widget-gathering, feel free to ignore this whole argument.
by [name redacted]
Originally published in some form by Next Generation. Doesn’t seem to be up anymore, and I don’t remember if anything was changed.
Xbox marketing chief Peter Moore has done his job well enough, declaring the 360 launch catalog the “best lineup in history”. Of course, most people see through at least this level of hubris. Just for fun, though, let’s take a stroll through the lineup and see just how it adds together.
A quick glance will show four main categories of software: new games actually developed with the hardware in mind; pared-down PC ports; spruced-up console ports; and the prettiest versions of this year’s disposable sports games.
by [name redacted]
Originally published by Next Generation, under a title that I no longer remember.
Generally speaking, the controller sold with a console can be read as a microcosm of the console itself. (You might call it a rule of thumb – though I would not advise this.) That the Odyssey2 came with a right-handed stick and a single button for the left hand tells you that its games are simple, that movement is the central mechanism, and that if there is any secondary function its importance is minimal. That the NES replaces this template with a cross-shaped D-pad for the left thumb and two buttons for the right, labeled from the outside of the controller in the order that your hand meets them, says mountains of Nintendo’s idea of videogames, circa 1985.
I notice again that Dragon Quest VIII could easily be played on the Revolution. It’s actually mapped so 90% of the time you can just hold the Dual Shock in your left hand. Stick moves; L2 centers the camera; L3 is a dupe of the “action” button. The only major functions missing are for entering the menu or looking at the map, both of which are so minor they might as well be mapped to another button somewhere out of the way.
Something else I notice is that automating your party makes the battles play as in Phantasy Star II. This is preferable, I think — especially if you have a boomerang equipped. Which… furthers the Phantasy Star comparison, really.
What Dragon Quest is not, in any of its incarnations, I notice, is a game a normal person can watch and be entertained by. They’re very personal, introverted games. I think turning the battles into Phantasy Star battles actually aids this, for me. I’m not telling everyone what to do; I’m just doing my own thing, and this guy who happens to be with me, follows my lead.
Every fifteen minutes, my girlfriend asks me if I’m really having fun playing the game. Yes, actually. She kept asking me the same thing when I was playing Dragon Warrior 1 on the Game Boy Player a while ago. And yes, actually. I was having fun then, too. In my own special way. Which might not be “fun” in the objective sense; then, what is?
I just want to see how far I can get today, before I’m forced to turn back.
by [name redacted]
Week seventeen of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation
I recall a day when LucasArts had something to show for itself aside from Star Wars. For the record, I have never been fond of Star Wars. And from the perspective of someone who is not particularly impressed with the ability to play as Yoda in a duel versus Darth Vader, it is exceedingly difficult to find useful information on this game. After twenty minutes of research I can’t even tell what genre it is, although people keep talking about a new “space battle” mode.
IGN spends three pages comparing the game to its predecessor and going into specific detail about exactly what every character in the game is able to do. GameSpy is able to tell me that the original Battlefront was the best-selling Star Wars game ever, which tells me exactly nothing, actually. The site does talk about “capture the flag” mode, which suggests to me this is a first-person shooter. It then goes into detail about all the mega-cool things the writer was able to do in the game. Finally, GameSpot tells me right up front that this is “an online multiplayer [first/third-person] shooter with new levels and reworked AI”. So there we are.
I think this exercise probably says more about the game and its market than anything I could add.
I have been requested of more Dalek footage (as referenced here). Far be it for me to overlook a chance to show off.
The colors are deeper now, and more in line with the New Series Daleks. I don’t know if it’s obvious from here.
As before, this fellow is a product of Graffiti Kingdom. I’ve now beaten the game; it’s short, and intentionally easy. There’s a lot more that could have been done, in the end; I kept waiting for a few tools that never presented themselves, like the ability to rotate and move pieces you’ve already drawn, or to define a “body” element, or to set multiple attachment points. Or to set individual portions of arms and legs. Or light-up or “hover” pieces. There’s a lot of overlap, and not much organization. The versus mode is a wasted opportunity, too.
Still, it’s pretty neat for what it is; these are all just details. If someone’s paying attention, a DS sequel could be one of the niftiest games around. Come to think of it, maybe the map drawing feature I proposed earlier would work even better if the levels were 2D. That would bring this game even closer to Cocoron. And that could hardly be bad!
Despite the propoganda you may have read, the Xbox 360 has one of the least comfortable controllers I’ve held. It tries to be ergonomic, and is molded to hands that aren’t my shape. My knuckles bang. My fingers are cramped. Of course, my hands are irregular. And I hate every ergonomic input device I’ve ever encountered. This is like the split keyboard of game controllers.
For those unfamiliar with the changes, the 360 controller is basically a remolded Controller-S with the “white” and “black” buttons moved to the shoulders and turned into triggers, with a big “ON” button in the center, and (usually) without a cord. I’m not even going to get into the cordless issue, as far as typical controllers go; this is just about the corded version.
Now. Controllers are probably one of the major things holding back videogames. I hate them, as a whole. You’d think, with controllers being the most direct interface people have with videogames, people would put more thought into their design. There aren’t any good standard controllers right now; the GameCube one is clever, though it has too many compromises to do what it really wants to. And I can’t even think of many positive examples, historically. The only “good” ones I come up with are simply practical and competent, like the Genesis six-button and the (Japanese/version 2) Saturn pad. The S more or less falls into this category. Unambitious, but solid and distinctive.
As for the next generation, well. The Revolution should be interesting, at least. Other than that, ick. You can trace the mentality behind the systems by looking at their interfaces. Sony’s desperately trying to make the PS3 seem different, but not too different, by making the controller exactly the same except shaped like a batarang.
Similarly, Microsoft has decided to take the Controller-S and mangle it without any particular direction. The “on” button is… sort of interesting, I guess. It feels misplaced on a traditional controller. The thing that distinctly bothers me, though, if it’s possible to get over the ergonomic issues, is the button arrangement.
The white and black buttons (and indeed the start and select ones) get a lot of flack for their uncommon placement on the S. People aren’t really thinking this through, though. They do work, and work well, because they’re used for uncommon functions and because they’re placed in an out-of-the-way corner of the pad. If you need to access them, they’re at hand; yet otherwise there’s no confusing them.*
Anyway. Shoulder buttons are primarily useful for state changes; things you need to hold down while you access the face buttons. Four shoulder buttons is overkill in this regard. I see no purpose for them, especially since I have yet to encounter a person who is not constantly pressing the wrong shoulder button in PS2 games. (Notice this! Did a bell not ring?) They’re hidden, too similar, and secondary in your attention, and therefore easy to confuse.
Iif those extra two triggers are used at all, they’re usually for toggle functions or other things more suited to an out-of-the-way face button, like “select” in NES and SNES games. So, you know. In most cases, that’s the wrong place for them. Leave the shoulders uncluttered for things that actually need the placement.
Since removing the face buttons unbalances the start and select (OOPS, I MEAN “BACK”) buttons, they’ve been moved to the center where, whoops, suddenly they’re ripe to be hit accidentally again — never a problem on the S. Yes indeed.
The other thing that bothers me is, the original Xbox isn’t that bad a system. Yes, it’s big, not too imaginative, and it’s too firmly positioned as the tits-and-beer console. It’s really well-made, though, and there are some good ideas in its device and execution. And for a while, Microsoft was doing a good job patching the holes (fixing the controller, starting up Live). There was real potential for the 360 to be its own beast, and use past success as a foundation for something neat, as far as mainstream consoles go. Something with personality, and with balls (to go with its testosterone).
What we’re ending up with is a timid, sterile system designed by focus testing. And the pad’s an example of that.
I don’t think I need to explain how much Sony’s controllers now and have always sucked. And yet the PlayStation line is one of the biggest commercial successes in the history of videogames — so clearly Sony must know what’s going on! They’ve got four shoulder buttons on their pad, so let’s put four on ours! We didn’t really know what to do with those face buttons anyway.
Again, nobody’s thinking. The only reason there are four triggers on the PS2 pad is because the PS2 pad is the same as the Dual Shock, which is the same as the original PlayStation pad except with two analog sticks. Why two sticks? Because the N64 only had one. Likewse, the original PlayStation pad is the same as the SNES pad except with four shoulder buttons. Why four? Because the SNES pad only had two!
And now Microsoft has crawled up and inherited this idiocy, just showing how desperate they are. They’ve lost whatever vision they had; all of the creative people behind the original Xbox are long gone, leaving Microsoft with a body and no brain. All they have to go on now is high-definition displays and removable faceplates. Just — fuck you, you know. If you’re going to waste our time, then go away. Leave videogames to the professionals.
*: I understand some people hit the one on the left accidentally. This puzzles me a little. Perhaps again it’s just my hand shape; it’s never been an issue for me. However, even should my thumb somehow stray, that they are a different size, feel different, and are sunken into the pad should send me a signal. Fundamentally, I just see no reason why my thum should stray down and to the right from its “home position” on the bottom point of the diamond.
Now that I have a TV again, and now that I’ve retrieved my copy, I’ve been spending most of my time with Taito’s Graffiti Kingdom (the successor to Magic Pengel, if you’re more familiar with that). Why this game wasn’t developed for the DS, I don’t know; if there’s a third entry in the series, it had better be a DS game. Heck, the development team had better make a DS iteration, whether they intended to continue the series or not.
The deal is, you draw your own characters in 3D, and guide their animation. For simplicity, the program figures out how to animate on ts own; you mostly help to narrow its guesses. That’s actually kind of neat, though, as you’ll find your characters do all manner of things you wouldn’t have been creative enough to have devised on your own. As you play, you learn new abilities — both on the drawing and the animation ends. For instance, you might learn how to paint on your models, or to define a segment of your model as a wheel. You start with almost nothing, and are constantly fed a stream of new commands, at about the right rate to learn them all as they come.
As a videogame, it’s no great shakes. The levels are strung together to give you something to do with your characters, and the monsters mostly serve to suggest ideas for future drawings. The level design has a little thought put into it, in that it’s paced to feed you new situations at the rate you gain new abilities. There’s a story, though there’s no need for one. It would be easy to dismiss altogether were it not for the horrendous localization. I watched and listened, and I swear the emphasis, intonation, or timing of every spoken line in the game is off. Rarely is it even in the general dimension intended by the script. Which is not to imply the script is any better.
The localization problems, unfortunately, also extend to the painting and animation controls. The names given to functions and abilities are often misleading, and sometimes unintelligible. There is a little descriptive window whenever you select a function; its descriptions, such as they are, only further the frustration.
Despite all of this, it’s engaging as all hell. According to my in-game timer I’ve spent six hours in the game; the timer only records playtime. This is an unwise decision, as I have probably spent three times that drawing and animating, rather than playing. Were the game itself worth bothering with, Taito would have something downright dangerous at hand.
I should mention that although I have not played Magic Pengel, this is apparently a great expanion from that game. Pengel‘s drawing tools were comparably primitive, and pretty much all you could do with your characters was put them in a rock-paper-scissors match against other monsters. Imagine if, in the third game, you were able to do your own level design. Just draw a map, then refine the way the game fills in the blanks for you. Populate your maps with monsters of your own design. Then pack your level up and transmit it over wi-fi to other users, to play through with their own characters.
See, that’s what the game does — it inspires. Both in its good and its bad, it gets the mind churning. Any time that happens, it’s worth bringing attention to.
On that note, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:
From left to right, these are my four creations to date (in order of their device): Çirpy, Sashanaut, Krorn Jones, and Yoonie. The last is Shep’s character, Rælf. Which reminds me: this game takes up a hell of a lot of space. You’ll want a separate card for it, if you regularly play any other PS2 games.
And here follows some illustration of how they look and work:
My first-hatched, subconsciously perhaps based on an old character of mine (other medium, other lifetime) named Fluffy Ralf. Today I revised his legs to improve his walking animation. For a while I gave him a stupidly long bo staff to attack with; it clipped so badly when Çirpy slung it over his shoulder, I just had to remove it. So now Çirpy’s a close-quarters fighter, with a jump-back move after every two-hit combo. His feathers flop all over as he moves.
Yes, it’s based on my cat. Roughly. Sasha’s wings are nowhere near this fluffy. And he looks less like a toaster struedel. He does taste of strawberries, though. Never did figure that out. See his moves here and here! Sashanaut’s, I mean.
My fourth, and most advanced yet. He’s not perfect; I’ve no way to put his feet on the pedals, and there’s clipping all over. I’m kind of proud of how he’s come out. He started as just an experiment with a wheeled instrument, about fifteen minutes before I actually earned the “wheel” designation. Instead, I just used rotating pieces. It seemed silly to just have a unicycle on its own, so I put a bear on it. The bear would have looked bored just sitting there, so I gave him a book to read. That eventually turned into a magic book, with flame properties. I’m getting better with the drawing tools, I think; his profile in particular is distinctive. Note that his legs are specified as arms; otherwise, he’d just stand up and run around with a unicycle sticking out of his butt.
And this is how they look in a bowling alley.
Yes, I realize Yoonie’s footage uncannily resembles that of a lake beast of certain repute. I assure you, the coincidence is entirely coincidendal.
Krorn Jones was another experiment. I didn’t expect to keep him around for more than a few minutes; it’s just, with his long arms, his backflip ability, and his firearms, he turned out as my most powerful character — and he’s got some personality, for a robot. I just recently added some moving gears and decorations, since I decided he’s staying around.
That’s it for now!
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.
by [name redacted]
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.
ART
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.
AVATAR
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.
CAUSE-AND-EFFECT
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.
CONFLICT
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.
ENEMY
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.
EXPERIENCE
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.
FREEDOM
Doesn’t exist. See Liberty.
GAMEPLAY
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.
GAMER
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.
GAMEWORLD
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.
GRAPHICS
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.
INTERFACE
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
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.
MECHANIC
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.
MINDSPACE
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.
NARRATIVE
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.
NPC
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.
PLAYER
Life is but a stage, and we are all players.
POTENTIAL
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.
VERISIMILITUDE
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.
VIOLENCE
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.
by [name redacted]
Fundamentally, this was another opportunity to explain the value of digital maquettes and to demonstrate the rendering software Worch is most fond of. This seemed to go over fairly well, as Worch’s tools are powerful (and indeed elicited constant gasps of admiration from the audience) and he has a number of sound arguments for at least considering maquettes as an alternative modeling technique.
I want Goonies III for this system.
