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Spelunking into the Past

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

The last few days I’ve been fussing over Derek Yu’s Spelunky. I know that it’s been around for a while; it’s just one of those things I never got around to. I downloaded it, and then got distracted. Time moved on, and there was always something else to pay attention to. As often happens, I’m rather disappointed that I didn’t jump in sooner — and also glad it’s new to me now, with all the endorphin rush you get from that kind of new relationship.

I’m sure the game has been discussed to death, so I don’t intend to labor the point. For context, the game is a Roguelike platformer released for PC about a year and a half ago. By Roguelike, I mean it randomly generates its levels and fills them with both traps and treasure. Until you know the game inside out and can make an effort to beat it, the point of playing is to see how deep you can go, and how much you can achieve, before dying. The random level layout means the game is infinitely replayable. The easy death means that you’ll be restarting often.

The game is basically an attempt to rehabilitate, or reenvision, Tim Martin’s Spelunker, an early PC game mostly known for its NES port. Although on the face of it the game seems really neat — a tale of exploration and adventure and treasure hunting in the deep places of the Earth — Spelunker is nearly impossible to play, in that the controls are a bit awkward and nearly everything that you can do will kill you. Even falling from slightly over the height of your character spells death. It’s ridiculous, and has gained the game a sort of cult reputation for its perceived sadism.

You can see the thought processes; Roguelikes are difficult and arbitrary, yet within an addictive framework. Spelunker is difficult and arbitrary, and no fun at all. Why not combine the discipline of the one and the premise of the other, and create the game that Spelunker might have been? Good thinking, too, as Spelunky is rather marvelous and instantly claimed a place amongst the most respected of indie games.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

A Life Worth Living

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Some of the typical themes to indie games, and art games, and deconstructionist games in general, include violence, death, and loss. I find it interesting that the deeper problems of game design, toward which the more thoughtful game authors are drawn, so closely mirror a boilerplate list of human concerns. At least, metaphorically speaking.

Of the three, death and loss, and the association between the two, are the bigger concerns — perhaps because in the short term, with such a narrow communication bottleneck, it’s more worthwhile to hand out monosyllabic verbs for the player to sling around: shoot, run, jump, grab. Let players use the grammar they know, while you precisely sculpt a context to lend the discussion an illusion of eloquence.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Craft Service

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

Over the years, game design has calcified. If I were to pick a turning point, I might point at the SNES — a system of broadly appealing games that delivered exactly what people expected of a videogame, challenged few perceptions, and established the status quo for 2D console-style game design. Since then it’s been hard to get past the old standards — the prettied-up enhancements of Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid that added little new in terms of expression or design language, yet that refined the hell out of some proven favorites.

You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.

The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.

Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The New Generation – Part Three: Infrastructure

  • Reading time:20 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Videogames are finally finding their way. They’re moving in small steps, yet whether by need or inspiration change is in the air – a whole generational shift, an inevitable one. It’s the kind of shift that happened to film when the studio system broke down, or painting broke out of academia and… well, the studio again. In short, people are starting to get over videogames for their own sake and starting to look at them constructively – which first means breaking them down, apart from and within their cultural, historical, and personal context. When you strip out all the clutter and find a conceptual focus, you can put the pieces back together around that focus, to magnify it and take advantage of its expressive potential.

Over the previous two installments we discussed some of the voices heralding the change, and some of the works that exemplify it. In this third and final chapter, we will cast our net wider, and examine some of the cultural or circumstantial elements that either led to this shift, reflect it, help to sustain and promulgate it, or promise to, should all go well. This is, in short, the state of the world in which a generational shift can occur.

The New Generation – Part Two: Masterminds

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Something is happening to game design. It’s been creeping up for a decade, yet only now is it striding into the mainstream, riding on the coattails of new infrastructure, emboldened by the rhetoric of the trendy. A new generation of design has begun to emerge – a generation raised on the language of videogames, eager to use that fluency to describe what previously could not be described.

First, though, it must build up its vocabulary. To build it, this generation looks to the past – to the fundamental ideas that make up the current architecture of videogames – and deconstructs it for its raw theoretical materials, such that it may be recontextualized: rebuilt better, stronger, more elegantly, more deliberately.

In the earlier part of this series, we discussed several games that exemplify this approach; we then tossed around a few more that give it a healthy nod. Some boil down and refocus a well-known design (Pac-Man CE, New Super Mario Bros.); some put a new perspective on genre (Ikaruga, Braid); some just want to break down game design itself (Rez, Dead Rising). In this chapter, we will highlight a few of the key voices guiding the change. Some are more persuasive than others. Some have been been making their point for longer. All are on the cusp of redefining what a videogame can be.

The New Generation – Part One: Design

  • Reading time:15 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

An idea is healthy only so long as people question it. All too often, what an idea seems to communicate – especially years and iterations down the line – was not its original intention. Context shifts; nuance is lost. To hear adherents espouse an idea, measureless years and Spackle later, is to understand less about the idea itself than about the people who profess it, and the cultural context in which they do so.

In 1985, an obscure Japanese illustrator slotted together a bunch of ideas that made sense to him that morning, and inadvertently steered the whole videogame industry out of the darkest pit in its history. Since that man’s ideas also seemed to solve everyone else’s problems, they became lasting, universal truths that it was eventually ridiculous – even heresy – to question.

So for twenty years, skilled artisans kept building on this foundation, not really curious what it meant; that it worked was enough. They were simply exercising their proven craft, in a successful industry. Result: even as technology allowed those designers to express more and more complex ideas, those ideas became no more eloquent. The resulting videogames became more and more entrenched in their gestures, and eventually spoke to few aside from the faithful – and not even them so well. Nobody new was playing, and the existing audience was finding better uses for its time. A term was coined: “gamer drift”.

The Wii that Wasn’t

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Market analysts call the Wii a return to form after the relative flop of the GameCube. Design analysts call it a potential return to form after the relative rut of the previous fifteen years. Whatever the spin, when people look at Nintendo’s recent misadventures, generally the Gamecube sits right on top, doe-eyed and chirping. Its failure to do more than turn a profit has made its dissection an industry-wide pastime. Everything comes under the microscope, from its dainty size and handle to its purpleness to the storage capacity of its mini-DVDs. The controller, though, has perplexed all from the start.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

The Crowbar and the Trigger Finger

  • Reading time:10 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Phantom Fingers“; here is the article in full.

We make communication so darned difficult. We create languages, manners, rules, syntax, subtext, irony… We learn to love the language and its artifice – and the more we cherish our tools, the more signal that gets lost in transmission. Soon we get so caught up in what we’re saying that we no longer have any anchor in our surroundings, the foundations give way, and all our facades collapse around us.

Ueda Coulda Shoulda: The Quest as the Shadow

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this piece was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Rock in His Pocket: Reading Shadow of the Colossus“; here is the article as originally intended. This version is also available, largely intact, in The Gamer’s Quarter.

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 Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read

Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

Crime of a Mâché Nation: The Condescension of Viva Piñata

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Viva Piñata was supposed to be Microsoft’s mainstream breakthrough and Rare’s return to form after years of… well, Star Fox Adventures. More than that, it was supposed to be the game that showed why Microsoft paid so much money for Rare, almost five years ago now. The problem is, the game wasn’t really meant to carry all this weight. At its core, this is a modest, intimate, and difficult game – difficult in the sense that, despite its charm, it’s more exclusive than it is inclusive.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Dead Rising: A Trope Down Memory Lane

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

In 1985, Shigeru Miyamoto came to down with a truckload of tropes, and they were so wonderful, they did such a great job at filling the creative vacuum of the time, that it took two decades for people to notice the limits to their application. Now, step by step, we’re kind of getting back our perspective. Under Satoru Iwata’s oversight, Nintendo – so long, so much to blame for the entrenchment – has painted a huge “EXIT?” sign in the air, with a wave and a sketch. Valve has suggested new ways to design and distribute software. Microsoft and Nintendo have tinkered with how videogames might fit into our busy, important lives. Blog culture is helping aging gamers to explore their need for games to enrich their lives, rather than just wile them away. And perhaps most importantly, the breach between the Japanese and Western schools of design is finally, rapidly closing.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Ambition and Compulsory Design in Animal Crossing

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The thing about portables – and not everybody cottons to this – is that people use them differently from other game systems. You cradle them in your hands, within your personal space. You drag them around with you, pull them out of your pocket like a dime novel, then snap them closed when you step off the bus. Where console and PC games ask you to set aside blocks of your time, portables fill the cracks in your day.

All of these situational dynamics, and the psychology lurking behind them, inform the basic checklist for a portable game.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

How to Make the DS Better

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

That the DS is a sensation is both indisputable and deserved. That it has helped to change the industry should by now be reasonably obvious. All the more shame, then, that the system is not really built for success.

The DS was an experiment – a cautious stab in the dark, introduced almost with an apology in Nintendo’s early assurance that it was not replacing the Game Boy. Instead, Nintendo insisted, the DS was meant as a “third rung” in the company’s strategy in addition to its traditional handheld and console systems. Judging by how long it took the industry and its followers to “get” the system and its improved follow-up, the Wii, Nintendo’s caution was probably well-advised.

To Nintendo’s credit, it wasted little time.