videogames

Sound and Perspective in Experimental Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Whereas last year’s Experimental Gameplay Sessions were crammed into a standing-room-only meeting room, resulting in a nightmare for the fire marshal yet a powerful experience for the audience, this year’s sessions were moved to a huge, dark presentation hall.

Although the audience turnout was larger than ever, and host Jon Blow had more participants to introduce, the meeting somehow felt less intimate and more low-key than last year’s.

As before, the event sprawled over two and a half hours with a short break in the middle. Where last year’s sessions had a general theme of interpreting complex emotions and ideas through familiar game models – evidenced in games like flOw, Cloud, Braid, and Everyday Shooter – this year’s entries tended toward novel uses of sound and perspective. Perhaps half of the event was devoted to various game festivals, while several of the remaining presentations were of high-profile commercial games.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Fable is Love; Love is Puppies

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

This article had a strict deadline; I rushed to finish it so it could go live before the whole Internet had reported on the demonstration. And then… I guess it slipped through the cracks. Oh well! Here it is.

As another note, I think this was the meeting where Molyneux creepily offered his audience cookies. I was the only one to perk up. Hey, cookies.

Peter Molyneux was in loopy spirits, discussing his new game. Who knows how many times he had been over the same territory that day, though he seemed to enjoy spinning his tale, finding the right notes to highlight, the right places to pause for dramatic tension.

“Sequels are tricky things,” Molyneux started off. “Not my specialty. The sensible approach is to give you more things you like, better.” More weapons, new monsters, twenty times the land, guns! When Molyneux was asked to provide a sequel, he set off doing demographical research to see just what people wanted of him anyway. Then he opened “the doors of hell” – the online communities – only to quickly, in his words, slam them shut again. There were so many demands, so shrilly phrased – “so many people mortally offended by the design choices in Fable 1” – that the best Molyneux could do was sift out the most common complaints.

Mobile Session Itself Goes Massively Multiplayer

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by [name redacted]

Going by the online schedule, Gamevil, Inc. general manager Kyu C. Lee was to spend an hour chatting about mobile MMO games and communities, by way of his mobile MMO game, Path of a Warrior – in North Hall room 124, at 2:00.

In practice, the session was held in a completely different building and Mr. Lee was absent. With the blessing of the sound and technical staff, however, the small turnout soon took command, converting the session into an informal comparison of notes.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Ubisoft’s Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Adam Thiery, a designer for Ubisoft Montreal, gave a short talk today on interactive cinematography. His basic point was that game cinematography is player-driven. Simple it may sound; real application is always trickier. One of the big sticking points is that camerawork, being player-driven, is limited by current understanding of game design and player psychology.

A modern camera knows when to change state, explained Thiery. In Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, when the player is pressed against a wall, the standard tracking camera shifts from a behind-the-character perspective to show the player character left-of-center, and focus the player’s attention to the right, around the given barrier.

Thiery said that a good game camera is a matter of functionality, rather than cinematography – yet given that, it pays to consider the visual composition within each camera state. The reason is that any action a player takes is generally guided by what he has been shown to do.

The original Half-Life takes places in a disorienting sci-fi setting; to drive the player forward, it uses huge stripes painted on the walls, like a trail of breadcrumbs or an arrow. Though this is an artificial and somewhat clumsy application, that same principle applies to any 2D screen composition.

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Evan Skolnick Asks Game Writers To ‘Make It Snappier’

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by [name redacted]

Writing is one of the less discussed bits of game development; Vicarious Visions producer Evan Skolnick has been doing his best to redress the balance. Whereas last year’s session dealt with dialogue, this year Skolnick chose to discuss general structure.

Skolnick’s background is in comic books, and indeed much of his game industry work has been on comic book movie licenses; his methods are generally simple, direct, and accessible to an entry-level audience.

Up front Skolnick cautioned that the session was not for professional writers, but neither was it a debate on the essence of video game narrative, or a tutorial on “how to make players cry”. Rather, it was a by-the-book overview was for game industry veterans – programmers, producers – with little experience in the mechanics of storytelling.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Audience Cheers And Jeers Mobile Innovation Hunt

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by [name redacted]

Co-host Matthew Bellows apologized up-front for only selecting fifteen finalists, citing time concerns. After repeatedly assuring that everyone had enough beer to drink, Bellows explained the setup: in turn, each developer would explain to the audience what made his or her game so innovative; if he or she went on too long, the audience would razz him or her by flapping its noisemakers. The audience showed immediate enthusiasm for this plan.

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Nokia’s Sauter Talks Next Generation N-Gage

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by [name redacted]

Two years ago, at E3, Nokia announced a strategic withdrawal from the handheld arena; in place of a discrete handheld platform, future N*Gage hardware would be incorporated into Nokia’s full line of mobile devices. Today, Nokia director of publishing Gregg Sauter elaborated on the plans.

Sauter expressed concern that the mobile game industry, in its current form, is “immature”. As the largest manufacturer of mobile devices, in particular “convergent” ones, Nokia feels in a position to revolutionize the industry in this regard. “We really need to evolve this industry,” said Sauter, explaining that Nokia is in the middle of an essential transition from “a company that makes hardware to one that provides experiences.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Gathering evidence that the Wii is what the GameCube should have been

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The system: small, inobtrusive.

The controller. The GameCube pad was a strange half-measure.
* Its premise: standard controllers are confusing, overly abstract, and have too many buttons, mapped too arbitrarily.
* Its solution: make the buttons more intuitive to find, and more intuitively map actions to them.
* Result: everyone was confused and annoyed.

Original games, conceived for said controller.
* Super Monkey Ball
* Pikmin
* killer7
* Luigi’s Mansion

What else?

Setting the Standard

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part thirteen of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Road to a Universal Platform”. Now, despite my wittering most of these title and spin changes have a minor effect on the article. This one was… regrettable, though, as the article sort of makes the opposite point: though a universal format may be our inevitable destination, the notion is terribly premature. And yet because of the title and the spin, most people jerked their knees in response without actually reading the article. Oh well. Here it all is, as originally framed.

David Jaffe recently came under some criticism for a few statements to consumer website 1UP about his future visions of the game industry. The big headline, repeated across the Internet for a day or two, was “Ten years from now there will be one console”. It was an unguarded comment, following his own nostalgia for the days of rampant console exclusivity. Jaffe expressed annoyance at the current standard of cross-platform development, and wondered if it was coming to the point where the only distinguishing factor from one console to the next would be its first-party software. From there he made the leap that this small distinction might not be enough justification for multiple consoles – therefore, he figured, perhaps we’re on a road to a single universal platform.

There was much tittering in the aisles; a few people made comparisons to Trip Hawkins’ dreams for the 3D0 – a console standard that, much like a VCR or other piece of home electronics, would be licensed out to any manufacturer with the initiative. In fact, that comparison is pretty appropriate in that both Trip and Mr. Jaffe have the same reasonable – and actually rather clever – idea, with the same understandable flaw.

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.

Braid

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Oh hey. I just realized that Braid now has a website. It was only the Slamdance business, and related links, that led me to it. And on this site, we find some much-closer-to-finished screenshots:

1 2 3 4

The sprite art isn’t exactly what I was expecting from the GDC demo. I think I’ll have to see it in motion. The world, though — man. Yeah, this seems to be working out. Is it in widescreen, or is there a menu cropped off?

Curious thing now, with the game looking so polished: its deconstruction doesn’t seem so obvious anymore. When it was all sketchy, it kind of wore its commentary on its sleeve. Now that it looks more like a “real”, invested game, I wonder how clear its subversive qualities will be. If anything, this stands to make the game even more subversive.

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eleven of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

About a year ago NextGen published an article in which I groused about the early speculation about the Wii. The point, I said, wasn’t that we could now have real-time lightsaber duels; it was the extra layer of nuance that the Wiimote added on top of our familiar grammar – kind of the way analog control made 3D movement a hair less awkward. The point of motion control, I said, wasn’t to replace current control systems; it was to augment them, thereby to make them more flexible. A little more powerful, a little more intuitive.

Well, I was half right.

While we’re jumping the gun…

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I hope for Dragon Quest X, for the Wii, to filter players’ Mii data though a library of stock Akira Toriyama face and body features, such as to produce customized Dragon Quest styled approximations of the players.

That would seem like something Yuji Horii would have on his “to do” list.

Hey, Tim. Any way you can suggest it to him next time you’re in the same room?

Gestures and Measures

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Yes, I think that’s a decent way of looking at it. All these new, supposedly more “friendly” control schemes aren’t really acting as such. They are still forcing new players to remove their preconcieved attachment to, say, swinging a tennis racket, and replacing it with a more standard video game approach in order to get anywhere. They’re essentially just pushing buttons, in the end.

That’s not an issue with the Wii as such, I don’t think, as much as it is with the dumb, overly abstract way things are being designed. What I’ve noticed is that few Wii games either detect the Wiimote in realspace and realtime (as Boxing and Baseball do) or simply use the Wiimote for what it’s worth in added nuance (like an analog stick or trigger, only way more so). Instead, they’re just replacing buttons with gestures and canned animations. It’s frustrating to see — and not even so much as an end product as in what that product shows about how unable game designers currently are, en masse, to wrap their heads around the bleedin’ obvious.

Red Steel is a pretty good example. Instead of giving the player a sword and a gun, and letting him gradually learn how to use them properly — teaching new techniques and whatnot as the game progresses, staggering out “assignments” of sorts (not literal ones) over the game’s story, to allow players to get accustomed to some key concepts of swordfighting or shooting or mixing the two — you tell him to move the controller like this to make this animation happen, and maybe earn new gestures as the game progresses. What the hell? How could you possibly screw this up?

Though this is one of the more obvious examples, you’ll see this problem in pretty much all Wii games currently available — and indeed, in Gamer and press discussion about the system. You can see people straining their imaginations to figure out something to do with the system, and it doesn’t work. Either you get gimmicks or you get phantom buttons. Digital do-or-don’t.

It’s… really not that hard! The Wii really suggests two things: added nuance to traditional games (instead of just doing X, you can do X in any number of ways; the way the game plays changes dynamicly to match your body language) and giving the player true first-person control, for all the subtlety that implies, with a minimum of abstraction, over a certain range of motions. The advantage here is the ability to explore concepts with an organicity impossible with just a digital player involvement — again, making people really learn how to use a sword (more or less) rather than simply pressing buttons or making gestures to cause an on-screen character to do something.

Instead of the player’s avatar developing and learning new things as an abstraction of progress, and instead of learning complex arbitrary and abstract gestures (like moves in a fighting game), the player himself or herself physically learns how to produce difficult, subtle actions that have a tangible result in the gameworld to whatever degree of skill the player posesses.

Imagine a fighting trainer. The wiimote is exchanged for four sensor bands, strapped to each of the player’s wrists and shins, as well as perhaps a belt to provide a center reference point (and perhaps force feedback for when the player receives a blow). The game gradually metes out concepts to the player — not just to improve mechanical technique and to teach new maneuvers; also to improve the way the player mentally contextualizes all of this. It could to some extent teach the art of fighting as well as the science — or at least a reasonable enough facimile for verisimilitude. Likewise, completely new skill sets with no real-world parallel could be devised for the player — so long as they were produced and could be reproduced in a believable and nuanced way.

Games that involve physical concepts would use the Wiimote physically, as above; games that involve more abstract or intellectual ones would use it more abstractly — closer to how we normally think about playing videogames, except with an added layer of capability. Press forward to walk; tilt the controller subtly forward to jog or run forward; tilt it subtly back to creep; tilt it left or right (while still holding forward) to sway or dodge in those directions. The way this should be balanced, the player shouldn’t be expected to physically, consciously tilt the controller so much as the game should respond to slight changes in the player’s posture — those little subvoluntary movements that we make when we want the avatar to behave in a certain way — go faster, hold back, watch out! Excite Truck sort of tries to do this, though it doesn’t seem to be executed as well as it could be.

Likewise, a whole range of related motions could easily be mapped to a single button — much like the state-shifting afforded by shoulder buttons, except intrinsicly analog. Press the button to execute a punch; when pressing the button, move or position the Wiimote this or the other way way to punch in different ways for a subtly different effect. Flick the tip up for an uppercut, say. Imagine the way a Silent Hill 2 or a Metal Gear Solid could take advantage of this subtlety and flexibility — the way it could read into the player’s body language and movement patterns and extrapolate a certain level of psychology from them, to make unseen behind-the-scenes decisions.

This is a pretty damned important breach we’re crossing, here — and we’ve been given a decent, if somewhat rickety, bridge. Yet so far people are just laying the bridge on the ground and using it as a replacement for a sidewalk or a new kind of a bed, or trying to figure out really clever pieces of playground equipment they could turn it into. I kind of hope people get more smart, before the novelty wears off.

Horii Himself, Out.

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Yeah. This doesn’t completely surprise me, except in the sense that it actually happened.

Handhelds are a better place for introverted, focused experiences. (See Metroid II.) In terms of the mindset involved, playing a handheld is like reading a book, whereas playing a console is like watching TV. Again, look how perfect Dragon Warrior is on the Game Boy — how much better it is than on the NES. Also: having a lengthy “novel” game makes more sense if you can pick it up and put it down at leisure, rather than being forced to sit in one place and stare at a screen for hundreds of hours. Leave the consoles for flash and fun; visceral stuff. Like the Wii, say.

Also to consider: as great as DQ8 is, there are two major abstractions left that seem kind of contrary to what Horii wants to do with the series. For one, the player controls more than one character. That’s a little weird. For another, it’s got random turn-based battles. Honestly, that doesn’t seem like part of Horii’s great plan for the series. It never has; it’s just been something he’s settled with until now.

So yeah. The DS seems like an ideal place to put the game. What’s really interesting is the multiplayer aspect — which I didn’t expect at all, yet which again sort of makes sense, depending on how it’s implemented. If players can come and go at will — join each other or set off on their own tasks, each with his or her own agenda — it’ll work. If there are too many constraints to the framework, keeping people from just playing the damned game whether their friends are around or not, it’ll be a bit of a downer.

I’m kind of undecided what this game means in the end. On the one hand it seems likely it’s meant as an intermediary step while Horii works on Dragon Quest X for the Wii. Considering how far along this game seems to be (implying it’s been in the works for at least months, maybe a year), it seems like it’s part of a long-term plan. Also considering that the sword game seems basically like a testing bed for a new battle system… well, do the math. And yet, there’s this issue about the DS actually being the most suitable system out there right now (in terms of market saturation, the nature of the format, and the qualities it has to offer).

Maybe it’s just the most suitable platform for Dragon Quest IX in particular, for everything he wants to do with the game. If X is going to work the way I think it might, it’s going to pretty visceral and showy — demanding a home system. One in particular (that being the most visceral available).

Basically, every game Horii makes appears to be just another approach to the same game he’s been trying to make for twenty years. He never quite winds up with what he wants — though lately he’s getting a little closer. From what I can see, this is just one more angle, allowing him to capture a certain aspect of his vision that he hadn’t been able to before (perhaps at the expense of some other elements, that he’s already explored). So, you know, right on. These details seem worth exploring.

The next game… maybe it’s time to assemble? See how all the pieces fit?

The thing that I dig about Dragon Quest is that, whatever the surface problems, the games are visionary. It’s a strong, uncluttered vision that all the games reflect even if they don’t always embody it. As “retro” as they seem, they’re not just crapped out according to a formula; they’re each trying to achieve something that’s way beyond them — meaning an endless pile of compromises.

I find that pretty encouraging. Not the placeholders; the way Horii isn’t afraid to use them, while he roughs out everything else. And that he doesn’t let them distract him; he just devises them, then discards them when they’re no longer of use. He keeps chugging along, going through draft after draft until he gets it exactly right. It’s a very classical disposition. Very honest, at least to my eye.

He’s a lot like Miyamoto, except Miyamoto sort of gave up a long time ago. And Miyamoto’s vision isn’t quite as focused (though in turn, it is broader than Horii’s).

The one problem I can see with going from turn-based to real-time battles is that the battles in Dragon Quest — I don’t think they’re really always meant to stand in for actual fighting, as much as they’re a stand-in for any number of hardships and growth experiences that a person like the player might encounter in a situation like the quest at hand. Some of that might be actual battle; some of it might be much subtler and harder to depict in a game like this.

Keeping the battles turn-based and separated from the wandering-around makes the metaphor a lot clearer as a compromise, rather than as something special or important in its own right. Changing to a system that makes the game actually about fighting loads of monsters… I’m not sure if this is precisely the point he’s looking for. Still, it’s a trade off. Get more specific somewhere, you have to lose a nuance somewhere else.

I wonder what other sorts of difficulties or experiences could be devised, besides semipermeable monster walls holding you back. Ones that would add to (or rather further clarify), rather than detract from (or muddy), the experience. And preferably that wouldn’t be too scripted.

I’m thinking a little of Lost in Blue, though I don’t know how appropriate its ideas would be, chopped out and inserted whole. Still, general survival issues seem relevant: having certain bodily needs (and maybe psychological ones — though who the hell knows how to address that) that, though not difficult to attend to, cause problems if you don’t. So in the occasions you do run into real immediate difficulty (battles, whatever), you’ll be in far greater danger if you’ve been pressing yourself too far; if you haven’t sufficiently prepared. Likewise, injury might be a real problem — so the player would have to think carefully, weigh cost and benefit, before charging into dangerous situations.

Not pressing out would mean you’d never learn more, get better, stretch your boundaries. Being foolhardy would get you killed. Same deal we’ve got now; just more nuanced.

I’m sure there are other ways to do it. Maybe more interesting ones.

It could be I’m reading in some things that aren’t overtly intended. Still, I’ve never felt the battles were as important as what they stood for. They’re too straightforward. They’re used too cannily, as a barrier. The trick, again, is whether there’s an interesting and functional way of more literally representing what they might stand for. I dunno. Maybe not! At least, not right now. So all right, violence. Fair enough.