Smartbomb

Browsing my RSS feed earlier this week, a story from Kotaku caught my eye - Faith Fighter Pulled By Creators After “Manufactured Controversy”. I first encountered Faith Fighter about 18 months ago, when my friend Judith showed me the creators’ website while preparing an essay on one of their other games. Why were people kicking off about it now, when it was released so long ago? If internet rumours are to be believed, someone at the Metro stumbled upon the game, asked a few religious figures for condemning quotes, and had an instant story on their hands. Normally in this situation I would just take a few deep breaths and get on with my life, but I quite liked Faith Fighter, and the Metro has seen me through many years of long commutes to and from school and work, and I didn’t like to see one doing a hatchet job on the other. And so I furrowed my brown, devised a new pseudonym, and wrote an angry letter to the editor.

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They edited my letter a little, removing much of my criticism of their original article and replacing it with some reference to the subsequent poll, which almost makes it sound like I approve of their handling of the story. But what really frustrated me was the headline they used - “Far more than just a game”. Faith Fighter isn’t ‘more’ than a game at all… it won’t defrag your hard-drive while you play, it can’t help you bring your unmanageable hair under control and there’s no feature-length ending movie starring Steven Seagal (sadly). It’s just a game! A game that happens to be thoughtfully designed, instead of slapped together from popular film clichés.

The underlying story here isn’t about Faith Fighter, or even (as Molleindustria believe) “the media-assisted narrative ‘Islamic world vs freedom of speech‘”, but about Metro’s preconceptions that games are just silly, frivolrous fun. They mistook Faith Fighter for a childish attack on religion because it didn’t cross their mind that it might have deeper meanings. Then when I write in to point out their oversight, they reframe it as a freak curiosity - ‘more’ than a game, because games are so inherently childish, right?

Well, I’m pretty much done with that story for now… someone replied in today’s issue to disagree with me, buy only by missing my point and disagreeing with things I hadn’t said, so it doesn’t really count. But this whole episode is indicitive of a wider problem - one of those BIG ISSUES that the whole industry needs to put some effort into if it’s going to advance.

Why don’t people take games seriously? It’s a question that everyone within the games industry asks themselves at some time or another. On a personal scale, most young students hoping to make a career in games still face parental disapproval at their ambition to work in a highly skilled, highly creative, multi-million dollar worldwide industry. On a national scale, Tiga recently threw a hissy fit because the government won’t give them tax breaks comparable to countries like Canada or France. I think it would be a bit crass of me to start preaching that the government should introduce massive tax breaks that would directly benefit me, but I can’t really argue that the UK has one of the best pools of talent in the global games industry (not that game development is a tremendously global industry). It does therefore seem a little silly for the government to sit back and watch UK studios fall like dominos while foreign companies thrive in their tax havens, and I can’t help but wonder whether the government have quite realised just what a serious boon the games industry is for the UK.

This single question permeates the industry at all levels, but what is the answer? I’m afraid I don’t really know - it’s the kind of problem that an academic could spend a lifetime writing books about. But something I realised this week - while watching Peter Stringfellow give Kirsten O’Brien lapdancing tips during a recent documentary - is that the general public will never take games seriously unless the industry, including players, take them seriously too.

And that’s why it really gets on my nerves when I hear gamers trying to play games down. It happens more often than you might think! Feminist Gamers has a whole page that addresses this precise problem - when (typically young, male) gamers are confronted with an angry feminist ranting about an excess of fleshy curves in their latest favourite game, one of the most common responses is to say “It’s just a game!“, running with the idea that games are just silly entertainment, and shouldn’t be taken so seriously (so shut up!) Without going into the feminism angle, I think this whole line of argument is just plain stupid - it’s totally disingenuous, and hugely disrespectful to the very games that these kids like so much.

As for those working in the industry, I think the best way to measure the respect they have for games is by looking at the games they produce. Shigeru Miyamoto - as is often the case - can be held up as an example of a good designer in this regard. While Nintendo often spin his creations out into an uninventive series of sequels and remakes, the man himself continues to create a wide range of innovative titles, each with their own hidden depths and poetic narratives. At the opposite end of the scale, you have the guys who made Limbo of the Lost, who directly ripped off large chunks of other games in order to cobble together a generic point-and-click adventure and (in theory) make an easy profit. It would be easy to sit back and pour scorn on these people, but I realised recently that I often do similar things myself.

During the last few months, I’ve been quite saddened by the number of people in the games industry who have heard me talk about my game studies degree, and dismissed it as irrelevant, academic guff - I’ve been in a number of interviews where potential employers have asked me about it, and seemed a bit disappointed when I explained that it didn’t involve writing LUA scripts or building levels in UnrealEd. My usual response is to make a mental note to avoid having business with these people in the future, but reconciling this with my need for a job is a little trickier. But the important thing I’ve come to realise is that, a lot of the time, I’ve been quite sheepish when explaining the course to other people, including those in the industry - I can’t really blame people for not taking my qualifications seriously, when I’m nervously making jokes about Baudrillard. One lead designer even went so far as to say that I didn’t seem very passionate about games, which - I think this website shows - is an utterly ludicrous accusation.

So from now on, I’m going to be a lot more po-faced when introducing myself to industry people. If I can show employers that I’m serious about games, perhaps I can make them more serious about games? And once they become more serious about games, perhaps others will follow suit? The overall quality of games will improve, and I won’t have to write any more angry letters to newspapers.

Today’s issue of The Escapist features an article about the illusion of videogame interactivity. To quickly summarise it, the author begins by saying that games are differentiated from other art forms by their interactive nature, but then discusses how many emotionally moving games (the examples used are Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 - there are spoilers!) reach their emotional peaks during scenes that are barely interactive at all. Players are thrown into a particularly difficult situation, but heavy scripting ensures that enemies will always drop dead before they can finish the player off, or that bombs will always be defused with one second left on the clock. I think the implication is that interactivity has a time and a place, but game designers shouldn’t be afraid to take it away when it adds to the emotional force of the game. I don’t like the sound of this at all, but it’s worth talking about.

I think I can come across like a total purist when it comes to defining ‘games’ as an art form. I was always taught during my Economics degree that a game was a situation created by multiple agents, each with their own objectives and rules of action, and it’s something I’ve taken to heart when it comes to videogame design. The most contentious part of this definition is that single-player games cannot truly be considered ‘games’. This seems to upset a lot of people, but I do think it’s true - I would describe all single-player games as toys and puzzles; sandboxes to play around in and enjoy the results, or specific sets of challenges waiting to be overcome. The boundaries are not at all fixed, but they never involve truly strategic gameplay simply because computer-controlled agents cannot exhibit strategic behaviour. They are not intuitive, they cannot learn anything other than what they are told to learn, they are easily stumped by AI glitches that no human player would ever fall for. Defeating a computer-controlled opponent doesn’t require a true strategy, but simply a kind of ‘behavioural solution’ - learning to manipulate their predefined reactions as a kind of meta-game puzzle.

Of course, I would still call Monkey Island a computer game even though it has no strategic element, it’s just a different use of the same word. A computer game can be a game or a toy or a puzzle or something else - I like to think that the only essential features are that they must be played on some kind of computer and they must involve at least some kind of player action. Even in the case of a game like Sentient, where players can start a new game, put the control pad down and enjoy a (limited) gameplay experience while waiting for a solar flare to rip through the shuttle bay and kill them, inaction represents a concious choice of action on the part of the player. So by these standards, I think the gaming medium is very broad, and I’m always interested in new interpretations of the form (as anyone who’s heard me talk about Rhythm Tengoku can attest).

So anyway, I recently played through Metal Gear Solid 2 after many years of failed attempts at learning to sneak properly. It’s a game that is famous for being full of long cut-scenes - a combination of game engine cinematics, codec conversations and the occasional scripted gameplay sequence (such as using the directional microphone to listen in on conversations). It’s always tempting to go a bit Jon Blow and say that games like this are betraying the medium by dragging players out of the game proper, but I think there’s more to it than that. The thing I realised while playing MGS2 was that Kojima’s goal isn’t to create artistic games, but to create meaningful experiences, and he does it by combining different media. Some parts are interactive, others are cinematic, others are simply dialogue.

The storyline focuses on a plot to manipulate information and distort public opinion, with the new Metal Gear model functioning as an all-seeing, all-powerful internet filter. But not only must players confront the physical apparatus of the machine, they themselves must also cope with being manpulated by the political motivations of their information sources. Every character encountered in the game has their own personal agenda, often at odds with their affiliated organisation, and they all spoon-feed the player conflicting information about their identity, the game environment, the events taking place… almost everything the player thinks that they know. The strange thing is, the interactive portions of the game - in which the player strives to rescue hostages and destroy Metal Gear - generally serve to further the linear story, while the cut-scenes and codec dialogue - in which the player simply stares at the TV screen - seed the player with misinformation to manipulate their behaviour during gameplay.

It reminded me of Watchmen, which I saw at the cinema recently. I’m not going to talk about the film here, but one of the notable elements that had been removed were the chapter epilogues - the extracts from Under the Hood, the papers from Rorschach’s psych file, and so on. Most of the people I’ve lent the comic to tell me they skipped over those parts, but I think they add a lot of flavour to the story. Yes, they pull you out of the comic book format that Watchmen is supposed to be exploiting, but in doing so they give you fresh perspectives on the characters. They add to the story in ways that comic panels alone cannot, supporting them instead of diluting them.

I’ve come to see Metal Gear Solid’s cut-scenes in a similar light. Even those endless relationship chats with Rose have a purpose, to slowly and steadily establish your impression of Raiden as a useless, whining coward. It’s all pulled back into significance towards the end of the game, but it also serves simply to get on the player’s nerves. When the game was first released, everyone was - naturally - expecting to play as Solid Snake again, and Konami even relased doctored trailers full of cut-scenes with Snake in Raiden’s place. So when players completed the prologue Tanker mission and suddenly found themselves playing as this reclusive rookie called Raiden, they were shocked. It was another intentional plan to mislead players, feed them false information and manipulate their behaviour (such as manipulating them into buying more copies of the game?)

But the Escapist article describes a different phenomenon. I find these heavily controlled sequences of ‘fake interaction’ to be really dishonest. I can see why they would be very effective - just watching a video of the MGS4 example made me come over all funny, and I can see how it could be electrifying to play - but once the illusion is broken (as it has been, now) it just becomes a chore. Grand Theft Auto 4 made a total hash of this as the game went on. One of the later missions involves raiding an abandoned Sprunk bottling plant and killing a rival gang boss inside before he can escape to the roof. I threw everything I had into targetting him and taking him out as quickly as possible, but he always seemed to escape to the next room and I would always be killed by his surrounding goons. At one point, I shot him twice in the back of the head with a sniper rifle - enough to kill anyone under the established game rules - but the cinematic scripting had secretly made him invincible. Despite being repeatedly told to chase and kill him as soon as possible, the optimum solution is - perversely - to advance slowly and surely, killing his bodyguards from behind cover to preserve your health for the rooftop showdown.

Another example could be the player’s apparent invincibility in the new Prince of Persia game. Whenever the player suffers a fatal fall or is defeated in combat, their NPC partner Elika steps in to save them, and play continues. The idea was that, in this post-arcade world, players should be ‘beyond failure‘ - that with no need to eat up the player’s credits, there’s no real reason to punish them. Which is total rubbish of course, but I guess it was a pretty ballsy move. But what is the point of combat if you can’t lose? What is the point of a bottomless pit if you can’t fall in?

This is something that is going to bug me throughout HL2: Episode 3, I am sure. How much of my success is down to me, and how much is due to the game’s scripted influence? Considering how much work Valve have put into the Left 4 Dead’s AI director, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole game was designed to adapt to your playing style, dropping in as many enemies as it takes to slow you down and giving you extra supplies when you need a boost. I find the prospect a little depressing. If the hardcore gamer’s sense of pleasure comes from mastering the rules of the game, it seems unfair to let the game change its own rules during play.

Like most lies, these moments of ‘fake interaction’ might be appealing at first glance, but can wreak catastrophic damage once the truth is revealed. For an interesting counterpoint, there is a scene near the end of Shadow of the Colossus where the player is sucked into a portal, and can use their full range of moves to try - and fail - to resist being sucked in. But unlike the examples mentioned in the Escapist article, the player is expected to realise their destiny while the scene is still taking place. As they cling desperately to a pillar or a flight of steps, players watch their grip gauge - the most used, most important tool in the game - ebb away with sober familiarity, and they realise that they are simply delaying the inevitable. Despite all their adventures, all the colossi they have slain, they are still powerless in the face of the gods and wizards that oversee the game world, and Ueda expresses this using the same rules and interface that the player has grown familiar with.

This is more like the kind of interactive storytelling that I would like to see! Give players a sucker punch, pull the rug out from under their feet, but don’t lie to them! It trivialises the player’s actions and makes the whole game seem phoney. People rarely look back fondly on a time when they fell for a cheap trick.

When pushed, I usually say that my specialist field of game design lies in systems of interaction. One of the few subjects I found really interesting during my Economics degree was game theory, covering topics like contract design, social bargaining, signalling games, strategies for imperfect information, and so on. To really dig deep into the subject (to ’solve’ Chess, for example) requires too much algebra for my liking, but I think I have a good grasp of the principles.

Mathematical analysis is one of the main things I think about when playing a game. Don’t laugh. You do it too, probably without realising it:

• When playing a typical RTS game, you wouldn’t spend all your money on building power plants. This is just logical – without some kind of offensive force, it would be impossible to achieve your objectives.

• When playing an FPS game, you generally wouldn’t camp an empty corridor on the edge of the map. This is a question of behavioural modelling – when preparing an ambush, you need to consider which locations your opponents are likely to travel through.

• When playing an RPG, most people will remember the location of monsters that drop lucrative loot. This is about meta-gaming the in-game economy – maximising the financial return on your labour, so you don’t have to spend hours saving up to buy things.

These examples may all seem like common sense, but that’s just because society has taught you to play these simple games of optimisation. Life is short and resources are limited, so efficiency is – generally speaking – A Good Thing. It’s a message embedded into everyday life.

The important thing to understand in relation to videogames is that the process of optimisation can be fun, but to be fully optimised is generally quite boring. If, hypothetically, you calculated the single most perfect strategy for playing Street Fighter, you would win every game you played but you wouldn’t feel very satisfied.

You can experience a similar sense of dissatisfaction by watching the film Equilibrium. It’s explained at the start of the film that Christian Bale’s character is a master of the ‘gun kata’, a mathematically-optimised sequence of moves designed to win a statistically-modelled gunfight. The result is that, no matter how many bad guys shoot at him, you never feel like there’s any real risk of him getting hurt, giving the action sequences an especially dull sense of inevitability.

Getting back to the point, you can theoretically express any game as a group of mathematical functions and variables. The CPUs that lie at the heart of all consoles and PCs can only perform mathematical operations, and so these are the building blocks that all games are made of. The problem is that every purely mathematical puzzle has some kind of solution, and solutions are boring. Very few games are ever truly solved, of course, but optimised strategies always evolve from sheer trial and error – a million players will play a billion games, and discuss the results in pubs, forums and cafeterias the world over.

Therefore, one of my big aims in game design is to develop systems that integrate the logical processing power of computers with the emotive processing power of human players – in short, cyborg processing systems. To get an idea of how this can work, simply picture a traditional game of Dungeons & Dragons. There are well-defined mathematical systems that model combat, fatigue and so on, using dice rolls to simulate probability, but also a human ‘Game Master’ with a sense of emotion and intuition to match the players’.

You can get a sense of what a difference a human mind can make just by playing a multiplayer game. I’m a big fan of beat-em-ups and fast-paced deathmatch games because they require you to second-guess your opponent and react immediately to changing circumstances. As well as learning the maths of damage rates, move priorities and so on, there’s a strong degree of psychology involved – while studying your opponent and deciding what to do, you must also consider your own actions from your opponent’s perspective. Are you becoming predictable? Did your last attack scare your opponent? Will they single you out for revenge later? Do your allies think you are being selfish?

I believe these kinds of questions make games much more relevant to real life. They encourage a bit of social empathy, teaching players to consider the effects on their actions on other people. And this is all very nice, but I would like to take things a bit further! Playing Quake Live against other humans makes your opponents behave more realistically, but you’re still locked in a very mathematical battle of reaction functions – grenades arc according to server-defined gravity, armour spawns at particular co-ordinates, railguns do a certain amount of damage, etc. All your psychological modelling just boils down to finding the most effective way to do more damage and score more points. Doesn’t that seem a little dry?

I would like to see games that draw on players to actually process game rules. One example I’ve been thinking about for years now is a competitive game based on photography. Players would have ten minutes to run around a large map and take photos of things, selecting their favourite two or three photos to submit at the end of the round. After the time limit is reached, the submitted photos are collected up by the game and flashed up in pairs on each player’s screen. Players simply select which photo they prefer from each pair, and the game tallies up votes and calculates which photo is the most popular. In this way, the winner is determined by the artistic qualities of their work, rather than the efficiency of their strategy.

That’s a pretty simple example, of course – directly confronting players with a series of obligatory value judgements is rather blunt. But with a bit of development, I think you could integrate these ideas more elegantly – perhaps by monitoring smaller interactions? I play quite a lot of Animal Crossing, but I find the simple AI of my neighbours to be quite off-putting. Instead, imagine a system in which an central Animal Crossing analysis hub monitors players’ reactions to different gifts, for example, and uses this to model ‘realistic’ reactions among your own villagers. It would involve a lot more network connectivity than Nintendo would ever agree to, but it would also endow your neighbours with much more human behaviour. Or instead of the Happy Room Academy rating your room based on ‘feng shui’, it could simply be propagated out into other players’ games for them to react to naturally.

This is all still more of a general design principle than a concrete system, but assuming I get a job in game design at some point, it’s something I’d like to develop. Hopefully, we’ll be able to determine a framework of fundamental points that can be integrated into different game systems.

Towards the end of my dissertation period, one of the forums I’m on had a big discussion about hardcore and casual gaming. I kept meaning to write up my thoughts on the matter, but looming deadlines meant I never really had the time. More recently, I was asked to define hardcore and casual games and gamers as part of a job application, which gave me some serious motivation to set my thoughts in order and write them down somewhere. Today I’m going to adapt what I wrote, and expand it out a bit to cover some things that lie outside of the original question’s boundaries.

The games industry is currently obsessed with notions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ games. The main reason is simply a matter of profits: the market for traditional video games has grown steadily since its conception, but has been eclipsed in recent years by the phenomenal growth of the ‘casual game’ market. Everybody wants a piece of the pie, so many developers are exploring this new customer base and retooling their games to be more accessible for the casual gamer. To briefly flash over some high-profile examples, Fable II has a much more forgiving death mechanic than its predecessor, Dawn of War 2 features smaller battles and no base-building, and Team Fortress 2 has greatly streamlined its class roles and audio-visual information. But despite all the interest in casual games, there’s a great deal of disagreement over what casual games actually are.

In my opinion, ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ simply represent different attitudes to play. I see it as something similar to Richard Bartle’s attitudes of MUD players, in that players rarely fit one exclusive category but you can usually break their tastes down into some combination of these common attitudes. I also doubt that ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ are the best words to use to describe these attitudes, because they have a certain binary tone – if you’re not hardcore you must be softcore, if not casual then intense. These terms are trying to describe underlying attitudes to play, and I suspect there are more than two. Nevertheless, these are the terms everyone is currently throwing around, so let’s stick with them for now.

As I see it, hardcore gaming relates to Bernard Suits’ lusory attitude. Hardcore gamers accept all the frustrating rules and limitations that constitute a game because their goal is to overcome them. They will endure repeated failure, learn from their mistakes and gradually improve until, ideally, they can stream through the game without error.

Casual gamers are less masochistic. They want to be in control of their game experience, and don’t like it when the game begins to wrest that control away. While hardcore gamers savour the feeling of accomplishment that comes after mastering a game, casual gamers just want to sit down and have a fun experience from the get-go.

And that’s it. If you came here looking for a definition of hardcore and casual gaming, you can stop reading now. You’re done! The rest of this article will discuss the other extraneous issues often tied up in the casual/hardcore debate, and why they are dumb.

A lot of people seem to talk as if games, or gamers, must either be casual or hardcore. I think this is totally misleading. All games feature some combination of hardcore challenge and casual intuition, and all gamers enjoy some mixture of casual and hardcore games. I do sometimes talk about casual and hardcore games, but only to denote games that are particularly hardcore or casual – the majority lie somewhere in-between. Probably the biggest source of arguments in this regard is that games can be played in different ways. Tetris is a good example; there’s a lot of people who take it very seriously, but the majority of players just want to shuffle some blocks around while taking the bus home from work.

I don’t think there’s any strict link to genres, as many people assume. I’ve read articles claiming that 2D platformers are, by their very nature, more casual than MMORPGs, but I think that’s a total misunderstanding – I can’t believe anyone would say World of Warcraft is more hardcore than Mega Man 9. Part of the problem is simply that people can rarely agree on the definition of genres. I had to spend quite a lot of time researching genre theory while researching an essay on the subject of game genres, and going off my conclusions I have no problem accepting that someone might make a casual strategy game or a hardcore puzzle game. Kurushi was pretty hardcore, right?

That said, I can accept that there are going to be some general trends relating to genres. Online FPS games are generally going to be pretty hardcore due to their competitive nature, and social simulators lend themselves to casual gameplay, but the point I want to make clear is that this isn’t a hard rule. TF2 is a more casual FPS game than Battlefield, and The Sims is more hardcore than Animal Crossing. There’s no real reason why you couldn’t make a hardcore social sim – Dwarf Fortress, perhaps? – or a casual deathmatch game, provided you think outside the box a little.

There’s a strange kind of presumption among gamers that hardcore gaming is ‘true’ gaming. I imagine this is partly due to the name itself – a hardcore gamer, presumably, would spend a lot more time playing their game of choice than a ’softcore’ gamer, and would be better at the game. Few would want to stand up in front of their fellow players and describe themselves as a softcore gamer, especially when most discussions about the subject take place on gaming forums (virtual locker rooms in which overblown egos collide in an endless struggle to prove they are the ‘best’ player).

There’s also a historical factor. Old games – particularly the ones people still remember – were generally more hardcore than modern games (after all, if this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large, previously-untapped market of casual gamers for PopCap and Nintendo to make a fortune off). These games were marketed as entertainment for young people, leaving us today with a younger generation that have grown up with traditionally hardcore games and an older population that have not.

To a lot of the dedicated young gamers chattering away on forums, games in the style of Metroid or Final Fantasy are seen as good, traditional, ‘true’ games, while the recent influx of casual titles such as Brain Training or Virtual Villagers are seen as, essentially, ‘false’ games – silly little things that your parents might play because they suck at Halo. There’s an obvious track of reason behind this idea, but it’s very blinkered, built on the assumption that the industry has already explored all viable forms of gaming. The underlying truth in this matter is simply that hardcore gamers are very elitist. They play games because they want to overcome challenges, so of course they don’t see the point of games where there is no challenge – the fact that these games are often written-off as being ‘easy’ just goes to show that they don’t understand the philosophy of casual gaming.

There is a general divide in player demographics between young, hardcore players and older, casual players, but I think this is a temporary effect of the historical situation outlined above. To some extent, the idea of your parents playing Brain Training because they suck at Halo rings true, but the problem is not that they can’t play the game; more likely, they just don’t understand why they should. And why should they play Halo? Why should I play with a hoop and a stick? Why should your grandma play with Pogs? It’s different strokes for different folks.

The thing I’d like to emphasise is that this is not an innate relationship. In 40 years’ time we’ll probably see pensioners playing large font edition remakes of Contra: Hard Corps. Your grandchildren will probably grow up playing some kind of casual, augmented-reality RPG that doesn’t involve such baroque artefacts as characters, hit points or saved games. The content of mass-market entertainment has always been determined by contemporary fashions and technology, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

As far as I’m concerned, the whole ‘casual vs. hardcore’ debate is just a shock to the system as people come to terms with a ‘new’ way to enjoy games. I don’t really think it’s all that difficult to understand, either – hardcore gamers enjoy the satisfaction of mastery, casual gamers prefer gameplay to be fun in itself, and most actual players are a mixture of the two. It’s difficult for committed hardcore or casual gamers to really appreciate each other’s philosophies, but I don’t think this is a major problem unless they happen to work somewhere within the games industry.

A similar, but (in my opinion) much more interesting point of discussion is ‘gamers vs. non-gamers’. Active gamers are very much in the minority – in Europe, they represent around 30% of the total population. It’s my opinion that a lot of the most popular new wave of casual games, such as Wii Fit, are successful because they target non-gamers. But do non-gamers who play Wii Fit become gamers? Does jogging on the spot become a videogame if you’re shown a graph at the end? Have personal trainers around the world been GM’ing live-action fitness RPGs for decades without knowing? This is all stuff I’ll return to in the future, once I’ve thought it over some more.

Sad news this week, as Consolevania releases what is apparently its final episode. It’s been a bit hit and miss over the years, but the last episode managed to capture a lot of what was good about the series - heartfelt discussion about games, and a bit of informed parody (keep watching until the end of the credits). In case you’ve never seen the show before, it’s a mixture of reviews and sketches about games and stuff. There’s an awful lot of that sort of content being generated on the internet (*cough*) but Consolevania was a lot wittier and more intelligent than its peers; series 2 was particularly brilliant, as per this clip:

As sad as it was to hear that the show was ending, Rab’s diatribe about the review treadmill really struck a chord with me. When you make a career out of evaluating games, it’s very easy for play to become a mechanical routine, and this can really damage your sense of fun. I don’t think this problem is confined to professionals, though. Anyone who plays games for some ‘higher purpose’ - even if they’re just posting reviews on a forum, or writing a term paper about class conflict in Frogger - can learn to struggle on through a game they dislike, just because they feel they ought to. Once you become used to this frame of mind, it’s easy to just sink back into it whenever you play anything, and then every game you play just becomes a joyless series of criticisms.

It’s very tempting at this point to make sneering links to my favourite terrible gaming websites, but that’s pretty much the exact problem. Like Rab, I’ve been thinking back over some of the things I’ve said about games in recent years and I feel like I’ve been incredibly negative about things I’ve liked - I have a long list of complaints about Fable II, but ultimately its flaws are no greater than one of my old-time favourites like The Chaos Engine. This kind of attitude - expecting everything to be perfect and then spewing bile whenever an author’s work doesn’t match your own personal vision, whether it’s a game or a review of a game - is really childish and depressing. I guess we’ll see how well I manage to avoid it when I write up my Lionhead review blowout over the coming weeks.

Anyway, instead of sneering at someone else’s work, I’ll just link to someone else who has. Without grumbling about the technical style of the review, I want to highlight the tone of Pocket Gamer’s review of Dinosaur King for the DS. I read this recently - for a ‘higher purpose’, of course - and was struck by the reviewer’s complete lack of respect for the game. It’s pretty clear that the he doesn’t expect anyone to read his review - as a Japanese-only game aimed at young children, it has a very limited audience in the UK - and so he just goes off on a series of tangental rants, ragging on the simple combat system and generic storyline and repeatedly pointing out that it’s not as good as Pokémon. But so what?! It’s a kid’s game - of course the combat system is simple! Would he blast Love & Berry for not having online multiplayer?

This reminded me of another story I heard recently, about Stuart Campbell giving Socket: Time Dominator 0% in Sega Zone, years ago. He later explained it thusly:

“In its own right it wasn’t the worst game in the world by any means, but it was so completely ripped off from Sonic, yet so inferior, that there was literally no point in ever buying it rather than a proper Sonic game. Therefore, in the sense that reviews are a buyer’s guide, it deserved 0%.”

It’s a hugely arrogant thing to say, and pretty illogical if you ask me - he of all people should understand that people generally buy more than one game in their life, and there’s a good chance that any Mega Drive owner looking for a cute platform game probably already have the Sonic games in mind. That said, the review was written over a decade ago, so I’m not exactly fuming with rage about it. The important thing is that a lot of reviewers - including myself, on occasion - still seem to think along these lines, and I think it’s a really bad attitude that doesn’t help anybody.

It’s been far too long since my last update. I’ve spent most of my time looking for work, and I usually just feel too burned-out by the end of the day to say anything intelligent. I wrote a few half-finished articles, and came up with a load of Weekly Game Ideas that I haven’t got round to drawing, but that doesn’t really make up for this much slacking.

Finding a job in games is tough. I don’t want to rake through the details just yet, but my initial experiences of life within the games industry have been generally negative. It’s a little galling to hear games companies blame the government for a lack of fresh talent in the industry when many of the same companies are knocking you back for your lack of experience, but I’ll save that discussion for another day… it’s a complicated issue, and I’m in no mood to write a balanced analysis right now. In any case, it hasn’t been enough to put me off – I have had some good news too, but I’d prefer not to write about those chickens until at least one of them has hatched.

That aside, I’ve been playing yet more Team Fortress 2, hacking through another dozen stages of Fire Emblem, finishing Fable (again), Fable II, Black & White 2 and Mass Effect (again), failing to finish Left 4 Dead on expert, and having a terrible time trying to run Quake Wars on my knackered old PC. I’ve had a few cautious forays into GTA IV ranked play, but having to listen to XBox Live comm chatter makes for a painful experience. I can’t begin to understand why I can’t get the co-op achievement for playing with my friends.

As a result of all this, I have quite a few things I want to write about. I’m still not sure where I’ll find the time, but a lot of it will just involve adapting things I’ve already written – I found an excellent forum post I drafted out years ago, about golden rule growth models and the three dozer build. I feel like writing some reviews too, but (obviously) it all depends on what I’ve been playing. Right now I feel more inclined to write about reviewing, and games journalism in general.

I think this one could be revealing a bit too much about my psyche.

During a recent episode of River Cottage Autumn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gave a fleeting reference to lovage – a plant I have been gleefully looking for excuses to talk about since I first heard of it a year or two ago. To cut a long story short, I soon found myself reading Wikipedia’s list of companion plants. I love it when naturally-evolving systems of interaction have controllable, practical functions – another fun example is the use of guard llamas – because it creates wonderful opportunities to PLAY GOD WITH A TINY ECOSYSTEM.

The objective of Full Spectrum Window Box is simply to grow some nice stuff in your window box. The important gameplay schtick would be that all the different plants, insects, supplemental substances and so on would all interact realistically. Players might want to grow a lot of plant A, so they’d mix in some of complementary plant B to help it grow faster, and a few runners of plant C which attracts insect D, who help prevent insect E from eating all of plant A. All in all, it’s a kind of casual edutainment deal, with the ultimate objective of getting players to put down their joypads for ten minutes a day and take up small-scale gardening for real.

Among the comments to my post about scrolling shooters, John writes:

Maybe with the alternate path system your talking about, you could change the path and rhythm of the game [...] Thats got the old rub of making loads of content that people wont see though.

This reminded me of something I read recently that made me very angry. Kotaku’s Amanda Glasser recently had a go on the upcoming Wii port of Dead Rising, and noted the following:

“[We] wanted people to experience all the content,” says Capcom’s Chris Kramer – the man running the hands-on at Nintendo’s Fall Media Summit. Chris meant this in regards to the untimed missions. By taking the pressure off, you actually have time to go through and do all of the missions instead of having to choose which ones to fail and go back for a replay later.

It’s enough to make one vomit with rage. I love Dead Rising, but I can’t imagine it being nearly as much fun without the constant time pressures building up in the background. I consider it an essential part of the game. We once had a conversation in class about how to define its gameplay… personally, I think it’s best described as a ‘time-limited herding challenge’. Obviously there’s boss fights and photography and stuff as well, but I always feel the main task is to go out into the mall and bring back survivors. Maybe I’m just nice like that? Anyway, the sensation of slowing being crushed between the ever-decreasing time limits and the growing wall of zombies is what gives the game its characteristic challenge - shepherding a group of survivors from A to B would be really easy if you didn’t have a plot event scheduled at C in two minutes time.

During my first game, I remember I once had to abandon a group of six survivors at the wrong side of Paradise Plaza because I just couldn’t wait for their stupid NPC pathfinding to catch up with me. (That’s another thing I can’t understand people complaining about - as far as I’m concerned, the wonky AI just reinforces the fact that Frank is the only capable person in the game - but I digress.) Leaving half a dozen people to become zombie chow really affected me emotionally, because it was my decision. And it’s a decision that Wii players will apparently never face. Nor will they enjoy the euphoria of overcoming these challenges when they make a highly successful run - during my last game, I rescued almost all survivors and killed all but one of the bosses, and it made me feel like a king.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on a game. I’ve just about finished all the major mechanical functions, but I still need to produce a mountain of art assets. I’m planning on having five stages, but I also want to have different versions of each stage - like day/night, calm/stormy, etc - or hidden, alternative routes. Depending on how much of the art can be re-used between versions, this means I’ll probably need twice as many background tilesets as I would normally. This feels like a lot of work, but I definitely think the outcome would justify it.

Making decisions is what interactivity is all about, but there’s no point making decisions unless they have meaningful effects on the play experience - this is all stuff I touch on in my dissertation. I think creating more content than most people will see is great. Look at OutRun, for example. In a single run you’re only ever going to see five out of the fifteen stages, but having such profound control over your route - and conversely, control over which stages to ignore - is what makes it such a liberating experience.

The arguments against making more content than necessary are obvious and understandable, but if you’re going to create something totally linear where all players will experience everything, then you should really consider getting out of games and buying yourself a video camera. Having said that, I think the real reason Capcom are butchering Dead Rising is because the Wii’s inability to render a crowd of zombies takes away the challenge of herding survivors against a time limit anyway. That, and… perhaps they feel the Wii ‘audience’ want a more ‘casual’ experience? If you ask me, these are both good reasons to not bother releasing Dead Rising on the Wii at all.

And so we come to the truth of the matter - Wii Dead Rising is not Dead Rising at all. It’s a re-imagined spin-off for players - and consoles - that can’t cope with the original. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but it sounds pretty boring to me.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS COLLAPSING! IT’S THE END OF CIVILIZATION!

Alert readers will already be aware that I have a degree in economics. The main thing I learned from this is that our banking system is a fragile house of cards built on blind hope and empty promises. This blog isn’t the place to discuss the mess we’re currently in, but it is a place to invent games about it.

“It’s seeds and shotguns time!” is a phrase that’s I’ve read a lot recently, on some of the forums and blogs I read. My friends and I have jokingly discussed plans to emigrate and form a commune for years now, but the recent economic crisis seems to have spurred other people into thinking it’d be a genuinely good idea. Seeds and Shotguns explores this premise, giving players some basic knowledge of how to survive in such a situation, and presenting them with a more rounded, realistic experience than their Mad Max/Little House on the Prairie fantasies can conjure up. It’s not just about knowing when to sow what, or how to cycle your fresh water store, but also where to cache your excess food stock and who to shoot on sight. A bit like Fallout meets Harvest Moon.

With work commitments out of the way, I’ve begin to devote more time to my ‘portfolio’. I have a few things planned, but top of the list in that I want to make a fun little 8-bit style game – something simple enough for me to wrap my head around, but with enough leeway to still be interesting. Given my limited grasp of programming languages, I decided to use Game Maker because it’s cheap and easy, and within a few days, I had managed to piece together a nice little scrolling shoot-em-up engine. But where do I go from here?

I’ve played quite a lot of scrolling shooters over the years, but when I sit down to think about it, I can’t really describe how they work. I’ve been searching online for some design theory on the subject, but all I’ve found so far is a load of narrow genre definitions that focus on the context instead of the gameplay, and technical design theories about enemy bullet patterns. What I’m looking for is something that cuts through all this and gets down to the bare bones. What do I mean? Things like this:

• You control an avatar that can move around the screen and fire shots of some description.

• Your shots usually travel in a straight line, in the same direction as the scrolling screen.

• Enemies sweep across the screen in periodic waves.

• Touching enemies damages you; touching your shots damages them.

I think that’s the basics. Obviously there’s an endless list of exceptions and caveats, but I think most of these can be described as follows:

• You often have two or three different weapons to choose from, with unique qualities and attack patterns.

• In particular, you usually have some kind of smartbomb attack that does massive damage to everything on the screen, while being very restricted in number.

• Your different weapons are often interrelated – using weapon A powers up weapon B, for example.

• Enemies often shoot back! Their shots damage you, but not other enemies.

• Some enemies linger on the screen until they are destroyed, most notably bosses.

An interesting observation at this point is that the scrolling screen seems to be neither here nor there. The optical illusion of flying over a forest or through an asteroid belt, only really has meaning as an explanation of why enemies keep flying away behind you instead of stopping to make sure you’re dead – you’re zipping along in one direction, and they zoom past in the other. At this stage, when I’m just trying to conceptualise the fundamental gameplay, I don’t really care what the background is doing – what’s more important to me is the effect the scrolling screen has on threat positioning, and stuff like that.

What do I mean? Well, in a non-scrolling shoot-em-up like Contra, enemies will run back and forth on screen and keep shooting at you until you kill them or run away; in a scrolling shooter like Ikaruga, enemies will usually move around in a choreographed formation and then fly away. I say “usually” because this is not always the case - stage 3 of R-Type is one of many instances in which a large battleship cruises along at a similar pace to the scrolling screen and forces the player to destroy each section before they can progress – but the basic principles remain the same. Enemies are on screen; some of them are shooting at you; some are moving more than others.

Around here is where I start having problems. It’s not too hard for me to come up with an interesting set of interrelated weapons, because there are lots of different ways weapons can work – different firing mechanism, different movement patterns, different properties for when they eventually hit enemies – but when it comes to things like enemy behaviour and placement, I can’t really appreciate them as anything other than threats to be eliminated.

I mean, given that the player will be flying along and shooting at targets, what other effects can their shooting have? I’d like to achieve something more than just killing a load of enemies, even if I’m sticking to the same style of gameplay – basically, firing an awkwardly-aimed gun at moving targets while dodging about. It’s not even terribly difficult to think of a non-violent context for this behaviour – imagine if the player is flying along in a gyrocopter, throwing breadcrumbs at passing birds – but you’re still just moving and shooting and moving and shooting. Is that all there is?

I’ve been trying to think of ways to make the game world a bit more explorable and interactive, but this doesn’t seem to gel very well with the scrolling screen. Everything is always rolling on by, and players only have a limited time to interact with things before they disappear off the screen. It reminds me of an old game on the Atari Lynx called Gates of Zendocon. At certain points in each stage, an exit gate would float past – players who stuck the level out for longer would be rewarded with exit gates that skipped a few stages. This is a little more like what I’ve been trying to come up with, but it’s still really simplistic.

Well, the process of writing all these thoughts down has given me a few ideas about what to do with my game, but I’d still like to throw it out as a question. What can be done in a scrolling shoot-em-up besides moving and shooting? Is there mileage in deliberately not shooting – picking out particular targets from a group while leaving the rest? What other activities make sense within a scrolling environment?