rpgs

The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalism

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Back in 2001, Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota started to think about tossing together journalists with game designers and theorists to discuss ways in which the medium’s give-and-take trial-and-error self-motivated approach to learning could be academically applied to the process of news-gathering. The timing was unfortunate, however, coming just after the dot-com implosion.

A few years later she pulled together a more academic discussion group on the matter, yet quickly became frustrated with the substitution of chin-stroking for practical application of any of their ideas. Whenever she suggested developing an actual teaching tool, everyone backed away, afraid how it would reflect on his tenure to be actively involved with anything using the word “game”.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

A Slime for All Seasons: Videogames and Classism

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part twelve of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “OPINION: Yuji Horii was Right to Opt for DS”.

You’ve probably heard this Dragon Quest business; in a move surprising to professional analysts everywhere, producer Yuji Horii has decided to go with the most popular piece of dedicated gaming hardware in generations for the next installment of the most important videogame franchise in Japan. If people are bewildered, it’s not due to the apparent rejection of Sony (whose hardware was home to the previous two chapters). After the mediocre performance of the PSP and the bad press regarding the PS3 launch, Sony has become a bit of a punching bag for the industry’s frustrations. Fair or not, losing one more series – however important – hardly seems like news anymore.

So no, what’s confounding isn’t that Horii has changed faction; it’s that he appears to have changed class, abandoning home consoles – in particular, the sure and sanctified ground of the no-longer-next generation systems – for a handheld, commonly seen as the lowest caste of dedicated game hardware.

Matsuno Ball

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Final Fantasy XII tries so hard not to be dumb — indeed, to actively address almost everything wrong with Japanese RPGs. The result of this effort (and of the general inspiration behind the package) is one of the most engrossing, sincere “big” games I’ve played in a while. I mean, I really, really enjoy this thing. Seriously! It’s a damned ballsy game, that I’d recommend to anyone. On the surface the only significant problems are thus:

  • The license board
  • That the gambit system isn’t more advanced
  • That the game still has these weird “turns” grafted in

The license board isn’t a bad idea in principle; it’s just in execution that it comes off as one more bizarre affectation. The idea is that any character can, in theory, learn to do anything so long as he or she has the training or experience to do so. Learning how to do one thing (say, to cast some simple white magic) makes it possible to learn similar skills, with just a little more investment. Learning to properly use a mace, on the other hand, won’t do much for your ability to cast Fire.

The way it’s implemented, though — urgh. Why can’t I wear a hat that I just picked off the ground, without first “purchasing” the ability to do so? If I know how to use one kind of sword, why am I wholly unable to use another unless I purchase the ability? And in typical RPG style, why am I all at once magically able to do these things, once I buy the ability? The way this should have been done is as follows:

  1. Call the damned things “proficiencies” instead of “licenses”. That makes it clearer what we’re getting into.
  2. For practical abilities (weapons, armor, use of items and accessories), allow anyone to equip and use those items to some percentage of skill. Those with no training in a bladed weapon would barely be able to do anything useful with a bastard sword, though they’d be able to swing it around and maybe, by chance, hit something for some amount of damage. Those with some training in swords would have a higher chance of using the thing well. Those with specific training in that type of sword would be able to use it perfectly. Likewise, there are some items (like a freakin’ hat) that anyone could wear to full, or almost full, ability — though maybe mastering the use would provide a subtle nuance. If there were any special bonus or benefit, maybe you’d only get that if you had the proficiency. For more intangible abilities — spells, techniques — allow anyone to at least attempt those to which your party has access, though there’s an extremely low chance of success unless they’ve mastered those categories. Anyone who has put in the effort to learn the abilities can do them flawlessly, every time.
  3. Choose the direction in which you’re going to study, rather than the licenses on which to spend your accrued points. If you want to learn how to cast “Cure”, peg it as your current goal; all points would go toward learning “cure”. Once you’ve learned the ability, an unobtrusive message pops up (much like a “level up” message) informing you of your success and reminding you to pick a new goal. (You can turn off the reminders in the option menu.)

There’s no real problem with gambits; this system is the main stroke of genius here. I just wish they were more nuanced. For instance, I’d like to be able to say “if [any enemy] is [within striking range], then [equip] [X melee weapon].” Then attack. Otherwise if they’re not in striking range, equip your range weapon and attack. Also, I don’t know why it’s not giving me the option to target enemies equal to or lower than X health; only greater than. You always want to beat the weakest enemies first, so you clear them away! Again, not a big problem; it’s just that I’m frustrated that I can’t always program my companions to act as I would act — which in theory is the point to the gambit system; to keep me from having to choose the same options over and over from a menu.

Finally, it’s a little strange that the game basically takes place in real time, yet everyone waits his turn to act. There’s no reason for this; it should instead be based on a sort of an initiative system (and retaining the ability to “pause” and issue new orders). Characters and monsters would act the moment they have the opening, and those actions would take a certain amount of time to execute. (Likewise, placement would matter a lot more; you can only hit someone if you’re rudimentarily within range.) The effect would be real-time battles to match the real-time maneuvering.

And on that note, I’d like direct control over my party leader. I want to be able to assign actions to my face buttons, and only have to call up a menu for my less common actions (or to send a command to my companions). This again can be an option — much as there is an option now to leave time running (instead of pausing) when you’ve the menu open. It would not significantly change the way the game played (at least, with the above initiative system), it would make me feel far more involved, and it would simply make more sense.

While we’re here, I wish the overworld would seamlessly stream instead of being broken into hunks of map. I realize this is due to the PS2’s famous memory limitations. Still, hey. Crystal Dynamics figured it out. Also: if it’s going to be forty-five minutes between save points, I’d like a quicksave option. That sounds reasonable to me.

I’d say that all of these alterations would be natural for any sequel to FFXII (especially now that Square is hot on sequels to individual FF games) — except Squenix (and millions of Square fans, and Penny-Arcade) seem to consider this game a failure best forgotten. Ah well. Grace wouldn’t be grace if it were self-evident.

It’s fun that the game pretty much sidelines the Nomura-chic protagonist (who I call Corey) and his “girl chum”, in favor of the more interesting supporting cast and their political drama. This might just be the first game I’ve ever admired for its spoken dialog.

The Crying Game

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part six of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under the title “Can Videogames Make You Cry?”.

A few weeks ago, Bowen Research published the results of a survey, on the role of emotion in videogames. Hugh Bowen polled 535 gamers on their own views and history, with the end goal to rough some kind of an objective analysis out of their subjective experiences, and thereby maybe to shed some light on what emotional effect videogames have had in the past. The paper is well, and humbly, written; its conclusions, though, are less than revelatory: the only genre that tends to elicit reasonably complex emotion is RPGs (presumably Japanese ones), while other genres all inspire at least some basic kind of motivational urge in the player – be it rage or fear or what have you. Meanwhile, the paper is full of comments about Aeris, and the profound affect of her death on people who had never played Phantasy Star II.

The problem, I suppose, is in the question being asked: “Can videogames make you cry?”. It’s a binary question about a complex issue, much like asking whether Americans are happy and then concluding “sometimes!” And indeed, Bowen’s answer seems to be “well, yes… probably. In theory.” A second issue is the way Bowen approached the issue as a matter of statistics – and then based his analysis on the subjective responses of a skewed sample. “Gamers”, as with any obsessives, have by nature a peculiar perspective of their medium – a medium which, furthermore, is not yet refined as an expressive platform.

The question should not be whether videogames are capable of eliciting complex emotion – as, given the complex analog weave of our brains, anything can result in an emotional response of any depth and sophistication. Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish), how much emotional potential videogames might ideally hold, and – assuming some degree of innate potential – how best to insinuate emotion into the framework or theory of a videogame. Or rather perhaps, how best to cull emotion from that same framework.

And Then There Were None

  • Reading time:25 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part three of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Five that Fell”.

For all its immaturity, you can tell the videogame industry is getting on in years. With increasing, even alarming, frequency, the faces of our youth have begun to disappear – forced from the market, absorbed into conglomerates, restructured into oblivion, or simply retired from the grind.

The first big wave hit back in the mid ’90s, when increased development costs, the demise of the American arcade, and the shift from 2D development left dozens of small and mid-sized developers – from Toaplan to Technos – out in the cold. Those that didn’t die completely – Sunsoft, Vic Tokai – often pulled out of the US market, or even out of the videogame business. Western outfits braced for the storm by merging with larger and ever larger publishing conglomerates, rationalizing that it was the only way to survive in an uncertain market.

The second wave came only a few years ago, after the burst of the tech bubble. In effort to streamline costs, parent companies began to dump their holdings left and right, regardless of the legacy or talent involved. Those that didn’t often went bankrupt, pulling all of their precious acquisitions down with them. Sometimes the talent moved on and regrouped under a new game; still, when an era’s over, it’s over.

This Week’s Releases (May 22-26, 2006)

  • Reading time:9 mins read

by [name redacted]

Episode forty-one of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

Steambot Chronicles
Irem/Atlus
PlayStation 2
Tuesday

You have likely read, if you like to read, of a game called Bumpy Trot; this site in particular, in the hands of Japan columnist William Rogers, has taken every possible opportunity to name-check the game – resulting in a blurb on the its Atlus USA site. Here’s where I remind you of its Western name – the Haruki Murakami-esque Steambot Chronicles – and mention that it really is nifty, for what it is. For a more elaborate description you can turn to NextGen’s “Ten Best Games in Japan” column for last year; for here, suffice that it’s sort of like a Zelda game done right, thrown into a post-GTA sandbox, and produced on a shoestring budget by a sincere bunch of underdogs who aren’t used to making this kind of game. So it’s a little wonky, and a little glitchy, and it doesn’t know what it’s not supposed to do, which results in as many weird decisions as inspired ones. It’s not really made for prime time, and yet it’s got so much heart and it’s got such good ideas that it’s got the workings for a real sleeper hit. Give it some hype and some word-of-mouth, and this game will surpass expectations.

Atlus has done a pretty good job on the localization; the voices are… solid enough, and the writing is appropriately stark. Though something tells me the game might have made more of an impression with its original Japanese name, the new one maybe fits the game a little better. This is only one of maybe a half-dozen impressive new acquisitions Atlus USA had to show at E3; if Atlus can just get the word out the way it did with Trauma Center, this could be one of the company’s best years yet.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 24-28, 2006)

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week thirty-seven of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

Guild Wars Factions
ArenaNet/NCsoft
PC
Friday

This is sort of an expansion, though it’s being sold as a standalone entity. Think of it as Phantasy Star Online version 2, for the Dreamcast. With Factions installed, you can access either the normal Guild Wars campaign or a new second campaign exclusive to this release. This second bit, which ArenaNet likes to describe as a completely separate game, has your new regions, skills, professions, and whatnot and a whole new feature set for guilds and multiplayer play.

They Call Me Boldric

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 22-26, 2005)

  • Reading time:21 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week seven of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Today (Monday, August 22nd)

Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)
Intelligent Systems/Nintendo

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Wars series. This is, what, the fourth Wars game announced in the West, after the two GBA iterations and the endlessly-delayed and frequently-renamed GameCube iteration. And it looks every bit as good as previous games. I understand it’s to make some decent use of the touchscreen with a real-time mode where you move things around with the stylus. Good and well; this is something the DS should excel at. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more strategy games and RPGs for the system.

The name, though – why is it still Advance Wars? The answer is the same as why Retro’s second Metroid game is called Metroid Prime 2, instead of just “Metroid: Echoes” and why Metal Gear Ghost Babel became simply “Metal Gear Solid”; it’s an issue of branding. The assumption, from a Western marketing perspective, is that you need “brand unity”. If you’ve got a successful product, you need to cash in on its name as far as you can. So if you’ve got a new cereal, you’re better off introducing it as, say, Cinna-Crunch Pebbles and putting Fred Flintsone in it, rather then letting it fend for itself, on its own merits.

The thing about the Wars series – well. It’s been around for a long time. Going on twenty years, actually. It began on the Famicom as Famicom Wars, then moved to the Super Famicom and Gameboy as Super Famicom Wars and Gameboy Wars. Thus we have Advance Wars. And since the GBA games were the first we were introduced to over here, every future game in the series must have the word “Advance” in it.

Well, to be fair, we’re to receive the GameCube one (called, inexplicably, “Famicom Wars”) as (even more inexplicably) “Battalion Wars”. I guess that complicates the theory right there. And the Western title for the DS game is no less arbitrary than the Japanese one (again, simply “Famicom Wars DS”). That doesn’t make this trend any less irritating.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 1-5, 2005)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week four of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation.

This week is devoid of releases. There are only three games coming out in North America in the next seven days, the most noteworthy of which is the PC port of Bloodrayne 2. So again we turn our gaze across the sharp, cold fins of the Pacific in search of inspiration. As before, everything that Japan has to show, it’s showing on Thursday. That is, in this case, August fourth.

Armored Core: Last Raven (PS2)
From Software/From Software (J)

The tenth Armored Core game in ten years, Last Raven is intended as a kind of return to form after the previous game, Formula Front. From is trying to stir up a bit of hooplah over this entry, both by posing it as a “tenth anniversary” game and as the final PS2 game in the mech action series. As far as what this game does differently, each part of the player’s mech now accrues its own damage; too much damage, and its efficacity suffers. Notably, according to the plot, the player must finish the game within twenty-four game-hours.

Wonder of Wonders

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Yuji Hori’s Dragon Quest was the first console RPG. It established the template that every other Japanese RPG has followed, and none of its sequels have fundamentally strayed from that form. It’s the unchanging grandfather of console culture. In Japan, it’s an institution. Here, it’s been a dud.

Maybe it was the name. Thanks to TSR’s lawyers, we knew the series as Dragon Warrior. On the cover, we saw a man who might as well have been Captain America, battling a huge, leering wyrm. Instead of a game where we took the role of this warrior, we got an introverted little quest where straying too far, too quickly was suicide.

Dragon Quest VIII is much the same; the only real change is in presentation. That might just be enough, though.

World of Warcraft (Windows/Blizzard) **1/2

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

This review was composed under strange conditions. I was flat broke; a reader sent me a copy of the game and said he’d pay to see my take on the game. Then after the review went up, I think four out of five responses were objections over the fishing example. Hmm.

I’ve stopped playing World of Warcraft. Actually, I stopped a few weeks ago; I only turned the game on twice in the last few days, to buy that orange tabby that I couldn’t name and to see if I had reason to pay money I didn’t have for another month of forgetting the game was installed on my hard drive and downloading a hundred megs of patches whenever I chanced to start it up.

Until I got to level twenty, I enjoyed the game. I wandered around, I improved my skinning and my leatherworking. Maybe those weren’t the best choices for a mage, since I couldn’t wear leather. Why be tidy, though.

It started out well enough. I found a nice role-playing server, where I presumed I would have less bullshit to put up with since everyone would be concerned with etiquette. The Internet is backwards that way. Give a real person a fake identity and he’ll use that as an excuse to go wild. Get into strip clubs preternaturally. Rent videos with no intention to return them. Speak in tongues, go to ren fairs, and wear fursuits. It’s a trap door from the monotony and the conformity of the suburban right-wing hate media spewing public school adolescence we all carry into our thirties.

Give an Internet person an identity, it becomes an anchor. It’s fake, and you know it’s fake. Deep down they know it too. It’s one of those lies you live with, comfortable lies, to grease the gears and keep the project moving. You all know you’re there to escape, so why rock the boat. Let’s pretend, they say. Don’t remind me of my real life. And it’s fair enough. We all have our problems. We all need to be someone, even a fake someone. The role-players are harmless and a little sad. They want to play the game right, and that sounds good to me. Let’s do it, I figure.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

“‘Chicken-chaser’? Does that mean you… chase chickens?”

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I just got Fable.

Why the fuck is there a top-level menu item to watch commercials for other, unrelated games published by Microsoft? I mean. Could they not have used that disc space for something more constructive?

I feel slightly dirty for having witnessed this.

EDIT:

I actually am enjoying the hell out of this, even if it’s not what I expected. It’s not even close. I was waiting for a cross between Shenmue and Morrowind. That sounded like the original concept for the game, anyway. Now it’s more like the offspring of Zelda and The Sims.

It sure ain’t the revolutionary leap it was touted as. It has a lot of charm, though. Even if the save system is bothersome, and I CAN’T GET THE DAMNED GOD-VOICE TO SHUT UP.

If the game were to just leave me alone and let me do my own thing without badgering me like, uh, any recent version of Zelda, I would have little problem with it. From what I’ve seen. Even its dumb videogamey qualities (the chests littered around the game world) seem on some level deliberate. If the game were to take itself seriously, I might not feel the same way. The tone is just what’s needed, though, to make it work in the form it is.

…

This evening, as I was pouring virtual beer into a virtual barmaid, in real life a terror-soaked voice echoed from down the street: “HELP! OH GOD, HELP! CALL THE POLICE! SOMEBODY! HELP ME PLEASE! SAVE ME! OH GOD! POLICE!” And. So on.

This was followed by another voice: “What the FUCK‘s your problem, huh?” And a smacking sound.

Then. Nothing.

Several minutes later, we heard a series of loud noises. Noises I have trouble finding words for. They sounded like the midway between a buzz-saw and someone sucking ice cream through a straw.

I don’t know what connection, if any, exists between the above events.

EDIT 2:

I just realized why the music so made me think of Danny Elfman — to the point where I was constantly tempted to mutter “something’s up with Jack/something’s up with Jack…”.

It’s because the music is written by Danny Elfman.

I, uh, had forgotten that.

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.]

Frickin’ Fantasy XII

  • Reading time:7 mins read

It’s one of those laws. If you say anything negative about Final Fantasy, you’re just asking for trouble. To be fair, the complaints I have gotten have generally been civil. I just haven’t had much patience to reply in any helpful manner.

>I see gameplay in an RPG to be a bonus if it is really great gameplay.

If a game is designed well, it is designed well. This genre is developmentally stunted, as a whole. The reason you say this is that you have not seen what greater expressive potential would be possible, were the design philosophy intrinsic to this genre as mature in its development as it could be, at this point in the overall history of game design and in the evolution of game hardware. Pretty much anything is possible now — yet developers have not yet caught up with this potential; increased their ambitions to fit it, and find a new set of limits of expression within the medium; preferring to stay with the same limited design decisions that they have, more or less, been using since the 1980s — decisions which were instituted at the time merely because of the inherent limitations in technology and in design theory at the time.

This is a problem in all genres. It’s just that RPGs are the most prominent example. In a broad sense, they have not grown to fit their bigger shoes. Developers are more or less doing the same dumb things they always have, out of habit — or out of a lack of understanding for what these design concepts originally stood for, or why they were instituted. Or because the audience itself has not matured enough to ask for something more substantial.

You must understand that videogames are not what they could be, artistically. There are few developers at present who are actively trying to explore the expressive power of the medium; the rest are content with absentmindedly churning out reiterations of games which have already been made dozens of times in the past — games which worked, once, in a specific context. They might have even been clever for their time, for the solutions to contemporary hardware and design problems that they happened to find. What so many people fail to understand, however, is that those solutions are relevant within a specific context — timeframe, developer, hardware — alone.  The solutions that Shigeru Miyamoto found and applied within Super Mario Bros. were ingenious for that moment, for that game, for that history. They were an evolution of ideas that Miyamoto nurtured through several previous games: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mario Bros. Although some of the principles that he developed in that game — such as his general concept of level design, whereby the game implicitly teaches you how to play it without ever telling you what to do, as such — will probably always be applicable in one sense or another. Others are inherent to that game, to that one man. They are his ideas. Anyone else who uses them as-such — who just takes them and sticks them into his own project, without understanding why the ideas existed to begin with — is making a big mistake. Those parts of that project will be false, because they do not come from the subject at hand. They do not grow out of what this second person is attempting to accomplish. They are an easy and proven solution, yes — yet within their context. This new person, with this new project, has created a new context. And that new context, especially with knowledge of what has come before, demands a new series of questions and demands a new series of solutions which evolve from the demands at hand.

Here. Take a look at what Toru Iwatani has to say. It’s interesting.

http://www.insertcredit.com/features/gdc2004/iwatani.html

The techniques that Yuji Horii created for Dragon Quest are great for Horii and for Dragon Quest. They are his own ideas, which suit what he is personally trying to accomplish. The gameplay choices he makes are perfect for his games. Outside Horii, the situation is different. The question has to rise: what are we trying to accomplish here, and what is the best way to realize that, given current technology and what we understand so far about the potential of game design? If, in the case of, say, a Final Fantasy game, our goal is to tell a story, then how rich a story can we tell? What kind of a story? What manner of game design would lend itself most well to what we wish to accomplish within that story? Ideally, the game design would be invisible. You would not distinguish between it and the ultimate goal of the project — because the design itself would come from that goal. It would be designed in order to facilitate that goal. The game design itself, the game play itself, would be part of that story, and the story would come from the gameplay.

It’s not like this is hard, today. Take a game like, oh, Metroid Prime. The goal in that game, really, is exploration: communication with the environment. To facilitate this, the game is set in a first-person perspective. That way, you’re left looking at the game world rather than Samus’s ass. The game has a rather profound story to tell, yet to do this it draws from the main goal of the game, and from the established gameplay decisions. It is in the process of playing the game, and of inspecting the environment, learning about the game world, that the story unfolds.

Although story is secondary or tertiary in this particular framework, and it evolves organically out of the more primary elements of design, without interfering with them, you see the structure. There is no reason why it cannot be turned on its head, such that the gameplay, the overall design, evolves from the story. If that is the primary goal. Of course, that means that the game design would depend on just what the story is; what its own focus is; what the writers hope to get across.

If a gameplay decision does not lend itself to the ultimate goal of the project, directly or indirectly, then it probably doesn’t belong there. It’s the whole deal about too many strokes spoiling the painting. Even more so when the strokes are misjudged to begin with. Or when they are put in place just because that’s the way it’s always been done, or that’s what people expect, rather than because that’s what the painting calls for.

As long as developers continue to cram their ideas into existing, prefabricated molds — which describes most of the persistent mechanical facets that people have a tendency to associate with the RPG genre, in favor of the more integral goal of the genre (mainly, showing the personal growth of one or more people through a set of difficult trials, and what effect their actions along the way might or might not have on the world around them — thereby, with luck, expressing something meaningful about the nature of life) — they will be stuck in a creative rut. They will not grow as artists. The genre will not grow. The medium as a whole will fail to mature.

What I was trying to say, in that preview, is that Final Fantasy XII seems like it might be one big step toward pulling the genre as a whole out of its current rut. Toward making people /think/ about what constitutes an RPG — or just a videogame, in general — and what what they’re really trying to accomplish.

The rest was just a bit of passing commentary, to help explain why I said that.