The games industry is full of creative people with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas about how and why games should be made, but all too rarely do these reach the finished games they produce. These aren’t drippy art graduates with half-baked ideas like “Let’s make Call of Duty but with flowers instead of guns!”; these are current industry professionals who prove every day that they have the skills required to make games. But even without factoring in office politics (I have heard matching stories from different sources about one of the UK’s top studios, where designers routinely splice new rules and systems in their AAA games without telling anyone because “it’s easier to persuade the project leads to leave them in rather than put them in”) the overriding fact is that games have to make a profit, particularly when hundreds of people have spent the last three years working on it, and studios simply can’t afford to gamble on experimental new ideas.

That’s fine though! I think it’s a crazy way to run a business – especially if you’re not one of the top dogs actually profiting out of it – but in the long run everything will be okay. All those studios that have closed down in the last few years (such as Midway Newcastle, Black Rock, and Bizarre Creations) have splintered down and reformed as smaller, more agile companies (in these cases Atomhawk Design, CCP Newcastle, Roundcube Entertainment, ShortRound Games, Boss Alien, Lucid Games, Hogrocket, and others).

These startups will produce smaller games at a faster rate, with less capital exposure to put them off new innovation. In fact they have an incentive to innovate, in the sense that it’s one area where they can realistically hope to outperform their larger rivals – good design is cheap! Certainly there’s the unpleasant business of the studio collapsing to go through first, but in the long run? Things turn out okay.

“The Indie Scene Will Save The Day!”

You know who has no money and huge stack of crazy game ideas? Indie developers.

Actually I think that’s a dumb stereotype. Many indie games – perhaps most, if you’re factoring in hobbyist and student projects – aren’t really all that original in my opinion, but the purely derivative ones get ignored completely so they don’t usually register in people’s minds. Similarly the image of a penniless indie developer is common, but of course in the real world indie devs can’t survive without at least some modest degree of success – or else they go out and get a second job!

I digress.

The thing that’s been on my mind since GDC – looking at the success of indie games like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy, both of which have attracted a lot of praise and interest from the mainstream industry – is that there’s no good reason why these games couldn’t have emerged from inside the games industry. Sure, there are reasons, but I think these are mostly to do with the kind of crazy business structure and counterproductive cultural practices that I’ve been ranting about in this article.

To give one simple example, I think games companies should allow their employees to work on personal projects and enter game jams on the side. If I was in charge, I would do everything I could to encourage it! It’s pretty standard practice for contracts to state that anything developed during the period of employment is the property of the company. I would guess it’s to prevent employees claiming ownership of things they’ve made during the course of their normal duties, but having a blanket policy like this can be really stifling – I personally know some talented people who have quit jobs over the fact they weren’t allowed to take part in game jams, and many others who routinely break their contract on the assumption that their employer won’t find out.

It actually infuriates me a little to hear Peter Molyneux talk about how much he likes Minecraft!

If this is the kind of game he likes, why do Lionhead continue to exclusively develop big-budget flagship games like Fable? There’s even a precedent in Lionhead’s case: after some employees got together and made Ragdoll Kung-Fu, they left the company to form Media Molecule and create the rather popular Little Big Planet series. And if you think there’s some kind of lesson in there about Media Molecule slipping through Microsoft’s grip, you should bear in mind that it happened in the months before the Microsoft acquisition – if the same thing happened again, Microsoft would be in a great position to sign the new studio up before anyone else knew what they were working on.

Then again, a few months after Molyneux starting showering Minecraft with public praise, Microsoft came out and announced that they would be publishing an exclusive console port for the Xbox 360. Honest praise for a game he liked, or buttering up a future business partner in his role as Creative Director of MGS Europe? If I wasn’t such a hugely bias fan I might not give him the benefit of the doubt.

Minecraft

Notch

That said, I think using Minecraft as an example of anything is a bit spurious – I like the game, sure, but it seems to have very much benefited from being in the right place at the right time, its popularity driven forward by underground internet powerhouses like the Something Awful forums as they screwed around with its emergent mechanics and had fun sharing the results. (There are lessons here in the value of putting toys in your games, and the marketing power of social networks, but this isn’t the time to discuss that either) It’s not even all that innovative really, being heavily inspired by the relatively-unknown Infiniminer and a game called Dungeon Keeper developed by a certain Peter Molyneux.

Minecraft’s incredible success really seems to have sent shockwaves through the games industry. One guy working in his spare time can turn out a simple Java-based PC game that sells millions of copies without any marketing budget! It’s a solid punch in the gut for conventional industry business models – there must be a lot of third- and fourth-string studio bosses out there wondering why they bother with development kits and employees when they could have been making millions like this. If you ask me, they’re right to! If the lesson here is to create personal games with a tight design instead of just making a Grand Theft Auto clone and trying to capture sales between rival releases, then I hope they all learn from it.

Is it worth mentioning that Notch also regularly takes part in game jams? Jus’ sayin’.

Adding to the madness is the recent news that the company Notch founded – Mojang Specification – have rejected a lucrative contract with EA and are instead getting into the publishing business! I have a lot of faith in their design sensibilities, but the idea of them cherry-picking indie games to put on the world stage sounds equally heroic and insane. I suppose my hope is that they’ll make a lot of money from that as well, and perhaps then the industry will pay closer attention to indie developments and maybe even use their initiative to recruit promising indie talent? I can think of a couple of companies that do this already, but I guess most companies just aren’t interested in emulating wacky little artgame startups like Valve or Blizzard.

You’re Doing It Wrong

I should add that there are evidently some mainstream companies keeping an eye on the indie scene for promising new IP! Unfortunately, more often than not they are looking for good ideas to rip off wholesale, as in the case of Gamenauts’ Extreme Fishing vs. Vlambeer’s Radical Fishing.

Of course I think it’s really crass and horrible for Gamenauts to clone Vlambeer’s game like that, but again I pretty much expect that kind of behaviour from faceless, profit-driven corporate entities. Besides, one of the lessons drilled into us during the ‘business’ side of my games degree was that you can’t copyright gameplay – Rockstar can do no more to prevent copycat studios from making their own Grand Theft Auto knock-offs than Vlambeer can prevent Gamenauts from making their own version of Radical Fishing.

To be honest, I like it like that. If games companies could copyright concepts such as ‘power ups’ or ‘experience points’ then I think it would be hugely damaging for game design – these things are like components of grammar in the language of game mechanics, and I think designers need to be able to experiment with them without stressing about lawsuits.

But really, isn’t there a business case for studios like Gamenauts to just hire designers like Vlambeer and get the same design ideas direct from the source? Despite what some people seem to think, a lot of indie designers might not want to work for a big studio. That’s okay too, but to me it  seems like good sense all round for studios to at least make some kind of offer – the studio’s resources would improve the game’s polish and marketing power, while directly involving the designer(s) would at best enable some exciting new ideas they couldn’t explore on their own, and at worst prevent the game from becoming a soulless, empty experience.

I don’t buy into the cult-like belief that indie games are the future, but from somewhere between all these trends – larger studios breaking down into smaller teams, project budgets falling, indie developers enjoying more success – I am confident that a bright future will emerge. As the divisions between the traditional indie development and mainstream studios break down, I think the combination of indie spirit and mainstream resources will lead to a golden age of awesome non-AAA games. You might say this is what’s happening already, in the mobile and social markets; it’s even creeping into the mainstream industry, if you look at the way Double Fine transitioned from Brutal Legend into Stacking, Costume Quest, Trenched and whatever other funky downloadable games they have up their sleeves.

My Favourite Part

The whole issue of graduates not having the required technical skills to work in the industry sounds like a real problem. Here’s the thing: I disagree.

Twenty years ago (!) SNES games were programmed in Assembly. Ten years ago, PS2 games were programmed in C++. Today, most Xbox 360 games have their gameplay defined in scripting languages, while whole mobile phone apps can be developed using the drag-and-drop interface of App Inventor. While hardware has become more complex, the trend in game development has been to move to higher-level programming languages – formats that read more like human speech, that are easier to work with and require less hardcore technical skills.

Okay, okay… obviously that’s not entirely true. Studios still need some serious programmers to create a bridge between these high-level scripting languages and the deep functions of the hardware, and obviously you can’t click together a quest using a drag-and-drop interface unless you have someone around who can program the drag-and-drop software. But in terms of setting rules and defining gameplay, we are always developing bigger and better tools to abstract the technology out and make things easier. If you doubt this at all, you’ve obviously never used Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights toolset… developed 10 years ago! Better yet, just ask Team Meat:

“There weren’t many tools used with Super Meat Boy. The in-game level editor was invaluable because it provided Edmund the ability to make levels with a “what you see is what you get” mindset.” – Tommy Refenes

Democratisation

There is a lineage of easy-to-use game creation software stretching back to when I was a child. I personally have experience of Klik ‘N Play, Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker, Kodu Game Lab, App Inventor and – as of last weekend – Stencyl, and there are many more alternatives out there. What’s really great is that many of these tools are cheap, if not completely free!

This is really one of the best and most exciting things happening in games right now! It’s true that a lot of the games being made with these tools are crappy clones, but the important thing is that people are able to make their own crappy clones now. These tools democratise game development, opening it up to people who don’t have serious technical skills, allowing them to easily experiment with different game rules and learning how they affect the play experience. And even if a particular program goes a bit off the rails, there are an increasing number of alternatives coming up to fill the gap.

This is excellent news for game education because it allows untrained people to get to grips with real game design problems – not ‘how many guns can we fit on the disc?’ but issues like pacing, balance and difficulty. I really think that giving people access to creative tools leads to a huge boost in their understanding how to use them! Just as technology like mobile phone cameras, Flickr and YouTube are changing our relationship with pictures and video, I really think it’s only a matter of time before tools like Stencyl and Kongregate change our perception of video games – not as commercial products promoting adolescent male fantasies, but as systems of interaction that express our experiences of the world.

BREAKDOWN! 1 – 2 – 3

Heroes Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone

Recently I was treated to a livetweeted report from the Edinburgh Interactive Festival by the fragrant Cara Ellison. Among the sessions was one by Ian Livingstone, who as far as I could tell was rehashing the conclusions of the Livingstone-Hope review. In a nutshell, the report claims firstly that the UK games industry is facing a skills shortage, so the government need to do more to encourage kids to study subjects like computer science and maths, and secondly that there are a lot of degrees in game-related subjects that don’t teach the skills that the industry requires.

The issue I have with the Livingstone-Hope report is that it leans too heavily on the idea that universities should train people for their future careers. In some industries/subjects this sounds obvious – I wouldn’t feel very comfortable being operated on by a self-taught surgeon – but in the case of games I think there are a few reasons why it shouldn’t be so focused.

For one thing, according to the report’s figures (page 49), the UK produces around 1,500 ‘games graduates’ every year, while the UK games industry only hires a couple of hundred new graduates across all degree subjects. This means the vast majority of games graduates (over 90% in 2009) do not get jobs in the industry! Even if all of their courses suddenly started teaching industry-appropriate skills overnight, there’s no way the industry could cope with that kind of surge. And if 90% of their students aren’t going to get jobs in the games industry, don’t universities have a responsibility to teach them skills that are more transferable? An education that can be applied not just to games, but to other areas of life as well. Otherwise they’re just raising the stakes as the students gamble tens of thousands of pounds of borrowed money on a three-year vocational course that’s unlikely to lead to a job.

I think there’s also some confusion over the value and purpose of game studies, as opposed to game development. Judging from the report, it sounds like game studies – as in studying theory, as with film or literary studies – are not valued highly by the industry, who would prefer graduates to have technical skills in programming and the use of editing tools. You might call this the difference between ‘training’ and ‘education’. I have an education in economics, but I wasn’t trained to be an economist; if I’d been studying on an ‘industry-led’ accountancy course (which is where I saw my life heading as I left high school), I wouldn’t have had the freedom to write about player behaviour in virtual economies, or the nous to transfer these abstract theories into the field of game design.

The very fact that game studies exists as a degree subject is a mark of the increasing cultural relevancy of games. And while game studios will always need strong technical capabilities, surely it makes sense to invest in a mixed basket of skills, including theory and philosophy? I could also make the argument that design theory remains relevant to development over a much longer period of time than training with a particular tool, but considering most graduate jobs in the games industry only seem to last about 12 months, that’s probably not going to interest anyone.

I think the problem is that the review’s findings are based on the requirements of the industry as it currently operates – the kind of graduate hires required to enable a culture of low pay, temporary contracts, crunch time, and frequent burn-out. Their requirements are biased towards maintaining this business model, rather than improving it. The most immediate example is that graduates need industry-grade practical skills because studios want to minimise training costs – if you think this is unavoidable, consider how many graduate schemes in other sectors ask for a 2:1 degree in any subject and do all their training on the job. Even if industry recruiters restricted their search to relevant degrees, I don’t think training should be considered unreasonable.

I’d like to add that I don’t disagree with everything in the report! Certainly I’d like to see a more advanced level of Computer Science taught in school – as I’ve said in some of my older posts, I first became interested in programming when I was 13, but had no formal learning opportunities until the very last year of high school. Also, although I’ve been through an excellent postgrad course in design theory, I bypassed the kind of undergrad courses examined by the report, so it’s quite possible that a lot of them are just plain inadequate – as ever, my internet soapbox opinions should be taken with a pinch of salt. The undergrad courses I am familiar with include those my friends studied at Abertay and Teesside, both of which are widely accepted as excellent places to study game design and development; I might add that half of these friends have burned-out and quit the games industry within their first 3-4 years.

An Alternative View

Flashback (Amiga version)

If the industry wants more children to study computer science, digital art, and other game development skills, I think they could start by making games that inspire them to do so. I’m reluctant to draw up a big argument based on my memories of playing games 20 years ago, but when I was young I played games like Populous and Flashback, and judging from the current sales charts it looks like kids today are playing games like Just Dance and Lego Harry Potter. I’m sure Just Dance is a lot of fun, but I don’t believe for a second that it will open anyone’s eyes to the magical potential of games the way Flashback can; at best, it might open the players’ eyes to the magical possibilities of dance.

Speaking from my own experience, the reason I became interested in making games was because I loved exploring these strange new worlds, and I wanted to experiment with making my own. I used to play a lot of Games Workshop games when I was young (a company founded by Messrs Jackson and Livingstone, pictured above), and they taught me a lot – to this day I credit Warhammer as the main reason why I have such a good grasp of probability and optimisation, as well as teaching me a lot about strategy and player psychology. The thing you need to understand here is that Warhammer, and particularly Warhammer 40,000, has a pretty dull setting! But Games Workshop have also produced a whole load of weird spin-off games – Blood Bowl, Necromunda, and Space Hulk to name a few – that looked at these generic fantasy and sci-fi worlds from spellbinding new perspectives.

Unplanned Games Workshop Digression

The microcosmic detail of a game like Necromunda carries a great deal of weight when players understand its position within the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The whole game takes place in the dystopian slums of Hive City, in which gangs of impoverished thugs battle for control of toxic waste dumps and jury-rigged power generators. Hive City is situated at the base of the towering arcology of Hive Primus, and serves as a proxy battleground for the political conflicts of its affluent, elite society – most gangs are patronised by one of the hive’s six ‘noble houses’, who confer particular tolls and boons on their chosen bands of goons. But Hive Primus is just one of many such arcologies on the planet called Necromunda, and Necromunda is just one remote planet within the galaxy of war and strife portrayed in Warhammer 40,000.

For anyone who has played Warhammer 40,000, especially if they’ve taken part in the big narrative campaigns that Games Workshop often run over the summer holidays, a gang fight between two dozen juveniles in the Underhive sounds totally insignificant! When you’re used to thinking on a scale of planetary invasions, of feuding ancient gods that can destroy whole civilisations in the blink of an eye, of the rich cultures and histories of all those alien races, it can be hard to see why anyone would care about which gang controls an old slag heap in a forgotten slum somewhere. I think that’s the beauty of Necromunda’s setting – it puts a fine grain on the Warhammer 40,000 universe by giving players an insight into the day to day lives of ‘normal’ people, away from the military campaigns of hulking space marines. But it also ignites players’ imaginations with the lofty notion that your gang might one day hustle their way out of Hive City, up through the Spire, and into the stars beyond – not just a vague endgame concept, but a sprawling, living universe that hobbyists are familiar with.

An Alternative View, Continued

In my opinion, few modern, mainstream video games possess that kind of magic. Instead, we’ve become channelled by market research towards a handful of specific genres – gritty shoot-em-ups, annually-iterated sports franchises, needlessly long fantasy RPGs, and free-roaming action games where you cruise around a city beating up inconsequential mooks. Childhood favourites like Sonic the Hedgehog have somehow evolved into games like Shadow the Hedgehog, in which Sonic’s brooding, angsty, morally-ambiguous clone runs around a city while shooting things with guns. What the hell, guys?!

It’s sad when studios appear to design new games by rehashing the popular innovations of industry leaders like Valve, Rockstar and Blizzard, but what really infuriates me is the way the industry’s marketing wing, by way of the specialist press, promote this uninspired tat as the cutting edge of game design. All those professional interviews and copy-pasted press release news stories, that focus on trivia about the number of guns or levels in the game, help to push this agenda – they teach readers that these are the questions that matter, that these are the terms by which game design should be judged. Here is an entirely unstaged example of what happens when a games journalist asks their fans for interview questions ahead of a trade show:

If the games industry is suffering from a creative drought, could this not be part of the problem? Not only because it encourage young gamers to think about game design with boneheaded simplicity, but because it signals to kids with natural creative flair that videogames can only be about a restricted list of subjects like guns, cars and kidnapped princesses – lacking the scope for self-expression found in film, literature, art or music. When the industry puts shallow design on a pedestal it sends out the message that games are shallow by nature!

And why does this happen? I would say it’s because production and marketing costs have grown to the point where publishers (and hence also developers) cannot afford ‘risk’. If you are in charge of a project that will cost tens of millions of dollars and three years to produce, you can’t afford to gamble on whether the audience will appreciate wild new gameplay ideas. Given the choice between developing an experimental new feature or duplicating an idea from last year’s Christmas best-seller, it makes sense to copy that which has proven successful… doesn’t it?

Not Such An Alternative View

Here is a good little quote from the Livingstone-Hope review that I will provide out of context:

“70 per cent of course assessors report a poor or unrealistic understanding [among students] of what working in the video games or visual effects industries actually involves.” – Livingstone-Hope Review, page 30

From both my time job-hunting and trying to arrange things for DarkZero, I have a lot of experience when it comes to being ignored by industry representatives. I sympathise with the students who think working in the industry is a lot like working on personal projects at home, but I can also see the wisdom in games companies keeping secrets – I work for a tech company and we certainly don’t go around talking about our methodology, or projects that are still in development.

But obviously the only people who can talk about the workings of the industry with certainty are people inside the industry – something to bear in mind while you read this article! If the industry need students to have a better understanding of what these careers involve, they have no other option but to take responsibility for that themselves. I thought this might be another wry observation that the report overlooks, but it turns they’ve already got it covered:

“The industries need to be more strategic in the way they engage with schools, providing better resources for teachers and career advisers, giving young people exposure to industry role models and developing a new national schools competition.” – Livingstone-Hope Review, page 6

Good mans.

The only thing I would add to that is that is that they shouldn’t only focus on schools and students, but also just be more open about the practicalities of making games in the wider media. Let it soak into public awareness! Not just to inspire kids, but to show to their parents that making games is challenging, responsible and rewarding – a good, honest career for their children to pursue.

If game developers want the general public to have a better understanding of how games are made, they should really start packaging special features like ‘behind the scenes’ features, commentary and development blogs in with their games as standard – not tucked away on a forgettable bonus disk as part of an overpriced limited edition release. In case any games industry execs reading this think that’s a dangerously novel proposal, don’t worry: DVDs have been proving that stuff is popular for over a decade now.

BREAKDOWN! 1 – 2 – 3

Last month I co-hosted an interview with Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes for the DarkZero podcast – the first time we’ve had any serious guest presence on the show since Michael Pachter’s surprise appearance, long before I joined the team.

The interview came about after another one of our rambling off-air conversations about the direction of the show, and where we stand within the crowded landscape of games podcasts. I find a lot of podcasts – including most professional shows – come across as groups of young gamers discussing their experiences of games from a strictly consumer perspective. They might mention theory and design concepts they’ve read about in a magazine somewhere, but they don’t often seem to really understand what these things mean. That’s okay too; it doesn’t make their experiences any less valid, and it’s the kind of conversation that most listeners can relate to (this is my excuse as to why they are all more popular than us). But personally I’d like to get more in-depth, talk about game design and why developers make particular decisions. Perhaps this is just self-interest on my part, but I think of it as ‘product differentiation’ – creating a show that doesn’t compete on the same terms as other podcasts.

We brainstormed ideas about how to run the interview, and we developed a general framework that would separate it from the cookie-cutter puff-pieces you read in mainstream news outlets. One of the key principles is that, whenever possible, we avoid talking about recent or current projects. To my mind, this is the primary function of mainstream interview coverage – the developer makes a game, the publisher’s PR department arranges a round of interviews, and the press talk to them about it. Everything is focused on the product: will there be new characters, how long will the story mode last, how many multiplayer maps will be ready at launch, that kind of thing. I guess that’s the kind of thing that the average player is interested in, but I find it pretty dull! Anyone could find all that information out from reading press releases, or playing the game for five minutes. If the creative minds behind a new game are going to take the time to talk about their work, I would expect them to have more interesting things to say than how many guns are in the game.

I first got in touch with Edmund back in February, while preparing for GDC. I had hoped he would agree to be part of a series of game design interviews/restaurant reviews I had planned to write for DarkZero (another idea for putting a fresh spin on interviews – it’s a bit ridiculous, and in hindsight I guess it might sound insulting to the guest, but I remain convinced that the results would be fun) but for various reasons – which may become clear if you listen to the podcast interview – it didn’t happen. When it came to deciding who to invite onto the podcast, he and Tommy seemed like a natural fit. We like their games, and we share many of the same interests outside of games – it’s the kind of chemistry that made the toilet discussion flow so well. To our great fortune, they agreed to appear on the show .

I’m satisfied with how the interview went (NB. outside my world of sky-high INTJ expectations, this means it was pretty great). I think there are some things we – as hosts – could have done better, but you can only really learn these things from experience. We talked about games, we had some fun, and we gave our listeners something they would never get from the mainstream media. Then, against all expectation, the media took notice.

Meatgate

VG247.com

During a conversation about digital distribution, Ed and Tommy remarked that they didn’t give a fuck about piracy. It seemed pretty clear to me that they were referring to the kind of piracy that they’ve experienced – you know, the kind of actual piracy that takes place in the real world. Obviously some percentage of Super Meat Boy’s playerbase have downloaded the game illegally, but this hasn’t really eaten into the number of players who have paid for the game – my fellow DarkZero hosts and I have bought it five times, just between the three of us. My understanding (based mostly on unsubstantiated internet comments) is that they’ve sold around half a million copies, and for a small indie studio that will pay for a lot of pizza and Red Bull.

Still, I guess in the eyes of the mainstream press this seems like an incredible new perspective – generally speaking, the industry line is that piracy is a terrible crime that hurts everyone. Team Meat seem to think that a certain level of piracy is unavoidable, and can be advantageous in a viral advertising kind of way – people who pirate the game and enjoy it will enthuse about it on blogs and forums, which will encourage other people to buy the game at least. Lots of news sites started quoting our interview (sadly not the anecdote about working in Blockbuster) and linking back to our little podcast. Overnight, our listener figures jumped up by a factor of 10; admittedly, that still wasn’t saying much.

This really hadn’t been the plan at all – otherwise we would have put the podcast on a more stable server, to handle the sudden traffic bloom – but in hindsight I suppose we should have been more prepared. The whole point of the exercise was to make a show that was new and interesting, and to succeed at this would naturally bring more listeners in, so we should have seen it coming. I remember at one point during the editing process we discussed whether to contact news sites and leak some of the more controversial lines, but decided that seemed kinda shallow and could misrepresent our guests. We didn’t realise that the other reporters would pick the show apart and do just that anyway!

And Then This Happened

IGN.com

A week or two after the podcast went out, IGN posted their own interview with Team Meat about piracy and the not-giving-a-fuck thereof. They asked a series of very direct questions about the same subjects they had already discussed on our podcast, and wrote it all up without mentioning DarkZero or any of the other sites who had covered the ‘story’. Later they even wrote a follow-up piece about how their exclusive interview had inspired some pirates to buy legit copies of the game by way of apology.

Some of our journalist friends thought this was bad manners on IGN’s part. Some of our listeners were absolutely livid, barracking their editors over Twitter. Personally, it doesn’t bother me much! I pretty much expect monolithic corporate entities like IGN to stomp on tiny operations like DarkZero without a second thought – the fact that every other news site had given us a link and a name-check had genuinely surprised me. In the same way that public recognition on larger sites is a great honour for us, I guess those same sites could find our ‘scoop’ embarrassing – I can appreciate that they might want to break that link to save face, and since they took the time to do their own extended interview on the subject then personally I consider it fair play.

More importantly – for me, at least – the whole style of their article is exactly the kind of thing we wanted to get away from. It focuses on the single issue that the publication wants to cover instead of giving the guests the freedom to say what they want – which is how this whole story came out in the first place! Maybe if IGN had a more sincere, open-minded approach to their interviews then they wouldn’t need to take story leads from scruffy graduates recording Skype conversations for no money? I’m not kidding myself that anybody else would care about this argument, but it does help me go to bed with a nice smug glow (…and no money).

The Bigger Picture

The difference between professional and amateur games journalism isn’t money; it’s access. You might also say it’s about experience and talent, but that’s missing the point – those are personal qualities that don’t just fall into your lap the instant you get hired. One of the reasons why we approached Team Meat was because they’re a small indie studio – you can email the guys and reasonably expect a normal, human response. By comparison, every professional game developer we have approached – admittedly, not many yet – has either ignored us completely or bounced us towards their PR representatives, who have ignored us in their stead.

DarkZero is a tiny fish in a HUGE pond, and the games industry does not seem interested in talking to us. What brief negotiations we do have seem to focus around our download figures, or our position in the iTunes podcast chart (which is, in itself, bullshit – while walking around the show floor at GDC, half a dozen different PR companies gave me cards offering iTunes reviews and subscriptions designed to artificially boost my product’s ranking, whatever that product was). As a general rule, PR reps are only willing to allow access to the creatives they represent if we can guarantee a large audience, otherwise it’s just not considered worth their time – and I’m pretty sure they would baulk at the idea of talking for two hours without promoting the latest product.

Astral Dreadnoughts May Look Strangely Familiar to Doom Players

I can’t be the only person who finds that a little sad, right? I’ve played games my whole life, and I’ve always been interested in hearing more from the people who make them. Speaking as a game designer, I know that it’s often the hobbies and interests outside of gaming that provide the biggest inspiration and influence on a person’s work – Pikmin, Nintendogs, Wii Fit and Wii Music all came from Miyamoto’s home life, The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon were inspired by rural childhood exploits and insect collections, Doom and Final Fantasy ripped half of their monster designs out of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual – and yet the only designers who seem to be routinely asked about their personal interests are leftfield pseuds like Will Wright and Keita Takahashi.

Obviously, well-known developers simply don’t have time to talk to every Tom, Dick and Harry who asks for an interview. We bear this in mind when deciding who to contact – we try to focus on people who have done interesting work but don’t get the attention we think they deserve. But even so, it upsets me that more established journalists don’t seem to be asking these questions – the whole point of our interview series is that it will help us carve out a unique position, but this position we’re taking shouldn’t be unique at all. Why aren’t we seeing this stuff weekly on sites like IGN or Gamespot? I think it boils down to the relationship between publishers and the specialist press.

The Media-Industrial Complex

Publishers are profit-driven organisations. For argument’s sake, let’s assume that this is ethical. Put simply, publishers fund game development in exchange for controlling rights over the distribution, marketing and sale of the finished product. Within their promotional role it is in their interest to secure positive press coverage, to try and maximise the return on their investment. It is therefore in their interest to ‘encourage’ positive media coverage from journalists, by giving them access to exclusive information and indulging them with promotional gifts and trips; or by threatening to deny them these same perks, or in some cases withdraw the advertising revenue that many specialist gaming publications depend upon. In this manner, publishers routinely attempt to align the interests of the press with their own. They often succeed, to at least some degree.

Usually these arguments arise in relation to corrupt review scores, but we’ll put that aside for today; my point is that publishers always have a new product to sell, and it’s in their interest to keep their customers – by way of journalists – focused on that. The reason why developer interviews often sound like advertisements for forthcoming games is because that is precisely the function they are intended to serve. Talking about other games, asking a game designer about their favourite movies, or introducing ‘negative’ questions like “What’s the worst game you’ve played so far this year?” can pull the conversation dangerously off-message. Despite occasional disagreements with retailers, developers, the press and sometimes even their own PR teams, publishers generally succeed in keeping the different branches of the industry running smoothly as a single machine, intent on keeping consumers focused on the next new product instead of appreciating what we have already.

I imagine some PR departments would consider our interview a bit of a trainwreck – it’s purile and silly and doesn’t promote anything. But in practice it turned out to be minor coup! Besides the obvious publicity, the good will gained from the gaming community purely on the strength of them coming out and expressing some honest opinions in a human manner actually led to some unexpected sales! Considering how much money the industry spends on anti-piracy tools such as DRM, it’s pretty incredible to learn that some people will pay money for a game they’ve already stolen if you just talk to them honestly.

I think it’s due to the human touch. Publishers are faceless corporate entities – or worse, corporate entities with ‘faces’ like Bobby Kotick and John Riccitello. Pirates often rationalise their behaviour by saying these organisations are too big to care about one lost sale, and I think when Ed and Tommy came out and explicitly stated that they don’t care, it kinda reminded people that they were normal human beings with rent to pay and food to buy. Their attitude to piracy is irrelevant – the pirates identify with them as human beings, much more than the media conglomerates forcing the patronising “PIRACY IS THEFT” message down their throats (NB. Piracy isn’t cool, but to call it theft is an oversimplification).

In many respects, the way the games industry goes about its business – cultural practices that have developed during 20 years of very rapid market evolution – seems counterproductive. Perhaps it’s a question of old media clashing with new? Or new media clashing with even newer media and looking strangely out of touch. It may all make sense from a traditional business perspective, but, as discussed in the Team Meat interview, some of these modes of thinking just seem outdated.

A Recent Example

A couple of weeks ago Eurogamer reported a tip-off they’d been sent that Borderlands 2 was in development and could be released as soon as 2012. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford responded with a tweet to dismiss this as “shoddy journalism”. The very next day an official announcement was made that Borderlands 2 was indeed in development, and that Game Insider would have an exclusive first-look at the game in the next issue. Eurogamer’s “shoddy journalism” was, in fact, 100% accurate.

By all accounts, the problem here was that the publisher had signed an exclusivity deal with Game Informer, and for that to carry weight other outlets are required to keep their mouths shut. My understanding is that this is quite common practice – journalists don’t want to break their NDAs and news embargoes because they could be blacklisted by publishers, hampering their careers. But how many people can a publisher silence? Turns out, it’s surprisingly common for smaller news outlets to unwittingly break embargoes, simply because the information is out there and they’re not considered important enough to be told that it’s a secret. I am reminded of DarkZero’s stunningly accurate prediction of the Wii U’s key features in the run-up to E3! Is it possible that other journalists knew what was coming, but knew better than to talk about it?

While you’re thinking about that, think about this: Game Informer is owned by Gamestop, who happen to be one of the biggest specialist game retailers in the world. The way I see it, this makes Game Informer one of the few magazines with real economic muscle to hold against game publishers!

So what?

To put my complaint as simply as possible, I hate the way the games industry is always pushing new products because it forces smaller and older games out of the public eye. I’d like society at large to develop a greater understanding of games and appreciate their role as cultural artefacts, but this is difficult when the industry’s PR wing continues to promote the idea that fancy graphics, tasteless gameplay or greater stats make for a better game. That stuff has the opposite effect, promoting the idea that games are shallow diversion for idle teens.

In some ways this is an area in which the industry is improving, when you consider all the remakes and downloadable emulator games that are available these days, but I think there’s still a lot of improvements to make – I’d love to see more companies follow the lead of studios like id and Rockstar, who have released some of their most famous classic games for free instead of packaging them up in an overpriced anniversary bundle. I’d also like to see a higher level of analytical discourse about games! Again, this is something that does exist, but mostly just in indie publications and unread blogs such as my own. I’d like to see more games designers come out and talk about their inspirations, and explain the nuts and bolts of how they developed their ideas to fit within the context of their game. In short, I’d like to see more honesty – but that’s pretty much true of life in general, not just within the games industry.

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In this final installment of TRAIN WEEK, we will look at some games that end with a train journey.

I’ve always been terrible at survival horror games, but there was a period in high school where one of my friends seemed to be play Resident Evil 2 over and over again for almost a year. I used to stay over at his house most weekends, reading his copies of OPSM while he work on his rankings and unlocked more secret items and outfits, so I feel pretty familiar with the game even though I’ve never even played beyond the police station. At the end of the second scenario the player activates a self-destruct system in the secret underground lab where the zombie virus was developed, and while waiting for the evacuation train to arrive must fend off a giant wibbly wobbly virus-infected mutant whose body is slowly ‘evolving’ into a giant writhing mass of claws, teeth and tentacles.

I expect you’ve worked it out already, but the train here functions as a symbol of ‘transportation’, as with the games that start on trains we looked at on day 2. The difference here is that the train represents a return to normality – a form of ascension, delivering the characters from the hellish pit they have been slowly descending into during the course of the game. In RE2’s case this is given visual emphasis by the use of the tunnel, the train racing towards a distant point of light that represents freedom and sanctuary from the unspeakable horror the characters have been caught up in.

At the last minute, the giant mutant makes a surprise return! Now resembling a giant, bloated face, it crawls its way up through the train cars and threatens to devour everyone on board. The player is locked into a carriage and forced to fight off the advancing wall of teeth and tentacles – another example of the claustrophobia motif we looked at yesterday. It’s similar to the escape scene at the end of Metal Gear Solid, in which Snake and Meryl escape from the Shadow Moses base while being pursued by an enraged boss character.

The difference here – the thing that makes it a quintessential ‘train’ experience – is that MGS puts much greater emphasis on physical barriers. The player must stop at checkpoints and clear a path before they can proceed; the boss attempts to ram the player off the road by slamming his jeep into theirs. RE2 takes a similar idea, but internalises it within the vehicle. There is never any doubt that the train will escape the tunnel before the lab explodes – indeed, the characters resort to stopping the train before it leaves to ensure that the beast is caught in the blast – but the tension surrounds whether the train will be carrying three human survivors to safety, or releasing one horrific mutant out into the wider world.

Half-Life 2: Episode One is the only game in the series so far not to have begun on a train of some kind, but it makes up for it by ending with a boss battle in a train station and the characters escaping from City 17 via rail. Again the train represents a means of deliverance from chaos, but in this case we spend the journey looking back instead of forward. Waves of eldritch energies engulf the city, and the player is encouraged to observe their destruction – note that the layout of the caboose means the player only has a 180 degree field of vision, and the terrain running alongside the tracks funnels the player’s interest towards the interdimensional fireworks show.

The effect is subtle. The player does not feel the same sense of racing towards hope, but a sense of relief as they have already escaped. It is at this point that a Combine Advisor flies past in an escape pod, foreshadowing the events of Half-Life 2: Episode Two – informing the player that this war is not yet over! Of course this scene isn’t viewed looking out sideways through a train window, because – bearing in mind day 4’s discussion on the linear nature of rail travel – the most powerful viewpoints on the train are directly to the front and the rear, moving either toward or away from another subject.

Finally we complete the circuit and end where we began. Half-Life takes the idea of symbolic transportation and makes it flesh – a literal metaphorical journey. The G-Man who made so many fleeting appearances during the prologue now addresses you directly, raising twice as many questions as he answers.

Flying through space in a recreation of the Black Mesa tram, Gordon is presented with one final decision – whether to work for this mysterious man, or return to the alien world of Xen and die fighting an endless battle. It captures the idea of the metaphorical journey perfectly! The player indicates their choice by either stepping off the train – a symbolic act of completing the journey, returning to normality, concluding the story – or remaining on the train and refusing to accept the G-Man’s offer – trapping Gordon in narrative limbo, never to return home, doomed to a pointless death, lost on an alien world.

Trains serve as both entry and exit points for these strange other worlds; they guide you through the unknown with the conviction of a steel rail; they are mobile panic rooms, secure but isolated from the outside world; they are an apex of public engineering; they are speed; they are distance; they are certainty. Trains serve many purposes within games, and I hope these articles have helped to stimulate your own thoughts on their use.

The games cited during TRAIN WEEK are far from an exhaustive selection. I’ve concentrated on games that I’m intimately familiar with – with the exception of The Last Express, I think I’ve completed every game used as an example over the course of the week (or watched friends do it, in the case of Resident Evil 2!) – and obviously stringing them together in nice thematic groups to establish a narrative flow may have introduced some argumental bias. I don’t think it’s possible to write a truly complete analysis of anything, but I think I’ve covered everything I had on my mind at the start of the week!

For a more technical perspective on Trains In Games, you could do far worse than checking out the heroic trainsingames.com.

For more examples of Trains In Games, see also Final Fantasy VIII, Unreal Tournament, Metal Slug 2, Action Half-Life, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Minecraft, Mario Party 8, Virtua Fighter 3, Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, Railroad Tycoon, Sunset Riders, Gears of War, Confidential Mission, Professor Layton, Wild Wild Train, Revenge of Shinobi, and Super Locomotive to name but a few!

TRAIN WEEK is over. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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Taking some liberties with the plot of the film, Goldeneye features a whole level set on a train. Despite all my talk about loving trains, I really hate this level – it’s not badly made, but the small rooms and tight corners make it really frustrating! In a game where the player is encouraged to use stealth and find routes around enemies, it’s striking when a tight, linear level like this suddenly forces the player to shoot their way through enemy-filled corridors, but it’s all contextualised by the fact you’re stuck in an armour-plated train. Well, how else are you going to reach Janus’ private carriage? It’s a neat example of the way physically restricting the player can add to the atmosphere! Under different circumstances (being attacked by tiny dudes in the ‘dream’ level in Oni springs to mind…) changing established game conventions so suddenly can come across as a cheap trick, and put players off.

Chapter 6 of Paper Mario 2 asks the player to solve a mystery during an long journey on an luxurious train. When I first came across this I assumed it would end in a similar way to Murder on the Orient Express, but by the end I was left wondering whether I should have given the writers more credit. Or perhaps I just haven’t watched enough films set on trains?

It represents a very different mode of rail travel to our last example – the train is comfortable, the journey evokes pleasure, etc. In this game the player may not appear to be very physically restricted, but they are ‘trapped’ on this (spacious, well-stocked, luxury) train until the mystery is solved. The claustrophobia of the train carriage is downplayed – presumably to avoid risking the frustration seen in Goldeneye and Secret of Mana – but the sensation of imprisonment is very much present.

The Last Express is a wonderful adventure game set on the Orient Express as it thunders toward Istambul. It stands out from most other games that have been mentioned so far this week in that gameplay unfolds in real time – one of the examples where the train’s scheduling comes into play. Many other oft-overlooked aspects of the train experience can also be found; for example, it’s possible to eavesdrop on characters’ conversations in close quarters, which is a subtle side-effect of being trapped in a small train carriage with other travellers.

Personally, my favourite thing to take away from The Last Express is the way that the game view changes its dimensions to reflect the room you are in – as you can see from the above video, corridors are shown in a very tall and thin format, while rooms are much broader and more balanced. It immediately clues the player into the environment, expressing different degrees of confinement within the train in a way that bumping against walls in an FPS doesn’t really capture.

TRAIN WEEK has rounded the final bend and is now shuddering into its final destination! Come back tomorrow, when we can all draw a line under this sordid affair.

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Typically one of the first technologies discovered in a game of Civilization is The Wheel, which unlocks the ‘road’ tile improvement. Roads generally provide two benefits: a movement bonus for units, and a trade bonus for cities. Generally speaking, players primarily use roads to connect their cities (to make use of the movement bonus), and then fill in the spaces around cities with networks of roads that go nowhere (to maximise the trade bonus). Quite late in the game – around the late industrial period – players can research the Railroad technology, which allows them to upgrade their roads, improving the movement and trade bonuses. The process repeats – major city links are upgraded, then minor cities, then bored Worker units cover the countryside in steel rails.

The result is that, at the end of a long game of Civilization, the world map resembles an endless spaghetti junction of twisting railways. It looks ridiculous – as with many other aspects of Civilization‘s design, railways aren’t supposed to appear realistic but instead just represent a certain tile upgrade concept. What’s notable is that rail is presented as a straight upgrade over road, and the huge time gap between discovering The Wheel and discovering Railroad puts it in a very privileged position in the player’s mind – perhaps even more so when you consider that this is generally the only situation in which a tile upgrade can itself be upgraded!

Sim City on the SNES tells a similar story. From the start of the game players have access to both road ($10 per tile) and rail ($20 per tile). Both tiles function in exactly the same way, except road tiles generate traffic and pollution, while rail tiles generate none. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to build road instead of rail, except to save $10 per tile, which isn’t really a worthwhile saving once you have to start paying out more to deal with the consequences of having a city clogged with traffic – in practice, players will find themselves scanning the city data maps for heavy traffic, deleting those sections of road, and replacing them with rail – at a total cost of at least $31 per tile!

This is one of many examples of Sim City‘s political bias – in this case, the idea that public transport (in the form of a light rail service) is a desirable replacement for roads and private cars. Speaking as someone who used to live in Gothenberg, it doesn’t sound so crazy to me! But regardless of how you feel about the statement, it is relevant to us as another example of trains being presented by the game rules as an aspirational technology – the pinnacle towards which players (and by extension, real-world city planners) should work.

The above scene from Secret of Mana is one of those moments where everything you thought you knew is turned on its head. The game is a fantasy RPG not unlike Zelda – there are swords, there is magic, there be dragons. Aside from a couple of lines in the prologue about an extinct civilisation there are very few hints as to what lies in wait towards the end of the game, but the player receives a strong clue deep beneath the legandary sunken continent. Now resembling a coral reef, players can only access this area through the temple of Dryad – the only building not to have been swallowed up by the sea when the island sank in ancient times. To begin with it looks more or less the same as any other temple in the world of Mana – the same tilesets, but with different colours and tints to reflect the patron spirit – but as the lower levels of the temple open out into an underground city, players begin to notice unusual new background graphics and objects creeping into the game. And then they board a subway train.

The change in environment comes as a real shock! It’s as if you’ve fallen out of Shadows Over Mystara and landed in Final Fight. The use of a subway train in this manner informs the player that the ancient civilization that built the city were technologically advanced, and had all kinds of junk which has since been lost to the world (later you will wonder whether the zombies on the subway are supposed to represent dead commuters who have been riding the rails since their civilisation fell to disaster). The everyday nature of subway trains makes this location instantly recognisable despite being so unexpected, and begins the set-up for some of the big twists going into the final chapter of the game; obviously the train is a much more advanced technology than has been seen previously in the game, but I think what really makes this scene work is that it’s presented in such an unassuming manner. It carries a deeper implication – not just that this kind of technology existed in the past, but that it was just a normal part of everyday life.

The other notable feature of this subway train fight is that the players have to deal with the shape of the carriage. There are many smaller areas in the game, but few with such an awkward shape  – zombies often wander off between seats, forcing the player to join them in these enclosed spaces as demonstrated in the above screenshot. Tomorrow we will look at this aspect of the train experience in more depth – the sense of binding, the claustrophobia, and the intimacy of travelling within a small, locked box.

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The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is a lovely little DS game that supports my claim that the best Zelda games are the weird little ‘side-story’ ones that fall outside the usual format. I think the inspiration for the train gameplay comes from The Phantom Hourglass (the previous DS Zelda game), which allowed the player to sail freely on the open seas (as in Wind Waker) but used a strange interface that forced the player to set their course on the map whenever they wanted to go anywhere. I suppose this was a way to compensate the player for losing the fine analogue control on the DS that they had on the GameCube, and obviously the context for the change is that you’re piloting a steamship instead of a sailboat – it’s far less reactive, you don’t have to work with the changing winds. Clearly it was a short jump from setting a course in Phantom Hourglass to plotting a route through Spirit Tracks‘ rail network.

The bulk of Spirit Tracks is spent travelling around the kingdom and restoring the eponymous long-lost magical rails to their former glory. In game design terms, it’s a literal form of railroading the player so they can only access certain areas of the game. I think players are much more accepting of this idea that trains can only run on rails than they are of more common restrictive devices. Consider this: how many times have you stood next to a locked wooden door with a rocket launcher in your hands, only to be told you need to find a tiny key to proceed?

Unlike Phantom Hourglass, the player isn’t limited to travelling the route they drew on the map, but can use controls like track switches to control their movements on-the-fly. One of the main reasons to do this is because of the strange ‘train combat’ system – there are EVIL TRAINS rolling around the network which the player must avoid. They can be incapacitated by cannon shots but (as far as I know) cannot be destroyed. Racing an enemy train towards a junction so that you can turn off and prevent a head-on collision is a defining Trains In Games experience! These moments of tension, and the exhilaration of success, only come about because the player must abide by the logic of rail travel; as is the case with all games, the fun comes from submitting to the pleasurable bondage of rules and restrictions.

It’s worth adding that the train gameplay Spirit Tracks isn’t limited to being a means of transportation for the player. Later in the game, the player unlocks passenger and cargo carriages, and can pick up NPCs and goods from some of the stops on the network and transport them to their desired destinations. What I love about this mode of play is that the player must not only pick a route through the rail network, and also avoid the evil enemy trains, but also obey any trackside signs telling them what speed to travel at or when to toot the train’s whistle! If you fail to obey these instructions – taking a tight corner too quickly, or entering a cave without signalling – you will upset your passengers and risk them jumping off your train in a rage. This moves the game into genuine train driving territory, like a primary-coloured Densha De Go! for children.

Many people are familiar with the Advance Wars series, although few are aware that its lineage stretches back to Famicom Wars, released way back in 1988. ALL of the Famicom Wars games have interesting little distinct features and are worth playing If You Like This Sort Of Thing – they’re entirely in Japanese, but series regulars should figure out the controls easily enough – and one such innovation in Super Famicom Wars (pictured) was the introduction of trains.

Certain maps include predefined railway lines, as shown, which usually connect strategic outposts in the same way as roads. Their function is to bear train units, which are built at special railyard buildings. Sadly there’s only one train unit in the game, but it’s multifunctional – it can transport up to two infantary units at once, it’s armed with a large artillery-style cannon, and it’s FAST! The downside is, of course, that it can only move along the railway lines, so their range and effectiveness are greatly defined by the map designer. It’s also pretty expensive, but you can’t put a price on cool.

Fans of the later games may recognise some of these traits from the Piperunners introduced in Advance Wars: Dual Strike. I think of the Piperunners are a kind of weird, long-forgotten cousin of the other Advance Wars units. They have a clear strategic position within your army – unlike Medium Tanks for example, which occupy a pretty worthless area between Light Tanks and Neotanks on the cost/effectiveness scale – and I think they demonstrate the value that rail units can add to the gameplay. I’d like to see railways brought back to the series, with dedicated ‘transport’ and ‘artillery’ units available – dare I suggest some kind of engine/carriage arrangement?!

Sticking with the subject of strategy games, one of my favourite levels in StarCraft II was this train robbery mission. Similar to the Star Fox 64 level we looked at on Monday, the player is dropped into an enemy base to destroy supply trains and disrupt their war effort. Its purpose in the campaign arc is to introduce the player to the Diamondback unit, an armoured hovercraft that can fire its laser cannon while moving – a vital tool against these unstoppable moving targets!

For me this level plays out like a tower defence map but – unlike most tower defence games – the route your enemies follow changes with each wave. You can strategise around the layout of the rails on the ground (eg. setting up choke points at junctions, where more trains are likely to pass) but you can’t deploy your units with confidence until the next route flashes up on your mini-map. While our last two examples used rail lines to restrict how the player achieves her objectives, StarCraft II uses them to define the objective itself.

Age of Empires III is set during the colonial period in North America. My favourite thing about this game is the concept of persistent ‘home cities’ that develop and grow with every completed battle, and the customisable deck of reinforcement cards that you can draw upon, but sadly none of that is relevant to TRAIN WEEK.

What is relevant is the appearance of steam trains, as seen in the above picture. Most maps include long, snaking trade routes, served by an endless flow of travelling NPCs. Players can capture trading posts at key locations on the route, and from these posts can upgrade the trade route – from carts to stagecoaches, and then to trains. As the route is upgraded, players earn more money whenever an NPC passes a trading post.

Similar to StarCraft II, the trading routes define fixed strategic lines across the map, in contrast to strategic points (such as resource mines or tribal settlements). Sadly there’s no way to attack or hijack the train, but it impacts on gameplay in that any player who holds a trading post can see the line of sight around the train’s position. Players who are performing any kind of strategic actions near a trade route must be mindful of the train’s location, or else risk giving their movents away to any other players in possession of a trading post.

Their other notable contribution to the game is to be a symbol of the industrial age; a visual reminder that times are changing and technology is improving. The representation of trains as high technology is more common than you’d think – arguably it can be applied to every case we have looked at so far – and will be the focus of tomorrow’s article!

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While Animal Crossing portrays rail travel with quaint realism, Final Fantasy VI pushes it to a metaphysical extreme. Taking the idea of transportation to its limit, the world of FF6 includes a phantom train that transports the souls of the dead to the afterlife. This steam-driven psychopomp is the setting for a short chapter of the game, but also serves as a boss fight – another boss so large that it becomes the environment. I probably wouldn’t care so much about this scene, except for the fact that players can command the hunky wrestling prince Sabin to LIFT THE TRAIN OF THE DAMNED OFF ITS TRACKS AND SUPLEX IT INTO THE GROUND. This is not just a great example of Trains In Games; it is not just a great moment in videogame wrestling; it is one of my favourite moments in the whole of videogame history.

Going off on a slight tangent, this talk of death and the afterlife reminds me of a level of The Addams Family on the SNES, in which the player has to ride a toy train through a room lined with hazards. This is an unusual example in that the player is standing on top of the train instead of inside a carriage, serving as a boundary case with more conventional moving platforms in games (which observe many of the same principles of fixed routes and restricted movement, of course). What separates it from the other examples in this group is that the others all use train journeys as shorthand for ‘transportation’ – the player usually jumps on, watches a cutscene, and jumps off in a strange new place – but The Addams Family draws your attention to the journey itself. Here you experience the train as a mobile sanctuary, safely bearing you through a dangerous environment, but forcing you to witness your passage and appreciate the train for the assistance it offers.

You didn’t really expect me to write a week’s worth of posts without mentioning Pokémon, did you?

One of the most mind-blowing moments in Pokémon Gold/Silver occurs after the player has ostensibly finished the game. After defeating the Elite Four, the player unlocks a ferry route across the country, taking them back to the region where the earlier Pokémon Red/Blue games took place. Little has changed since the events of the first game, but one new addition is the high-tech Magnet Train that runs between the two distant regions. Repairing the malfunctioning Magnet Train is an optional quest, but doing so allows the player to move between Kanto and Johto instantly, at any time. It serves as a means of transportation between not just the two regions, but also the two generations of games. It also makes a comment about the train as a technological advancement – until the train is restored, the player’s only means of travelling between regions is to either walk on foot through a dangerous mountain cave, or wait for the twice-a-week ferry service to ship them across. The Magnet Train is by far the fastest and most convenient option.

The thing I find most interesting about the Magnet Train quest is that the final challenge is to obtain a rail pass from a young girl whose family were displaced by the new station. She lost her favourite stuffed toy during the move, and the player is sent out to search for it! It’s a story that catches my attention because it takes an unexpectedly negative view of the train – Pokémon games always carry a vehemently eco-friendly message, and it’s really quite striking when an otherwise normal NPC questions the growth of green technology. It’s a very rare occurance!

Finally we have Shadowrun on the SNES, an outstanding example of a contemporary urban RPG. Players tramp burnt-out hacker Jake Armitage around the decaying futuristic streets of Seattle, fighting off hitmen and scrimping together cash to pay for back-alley cybernetic implants. Given its urban setting, it’s only natural that the player should make use of the city’s subway system to travel between different areas; what makes it relevant to this article is that, at the start of the game, the local subway station is closed.

Everything I’ve said about how trains represent transportation? Flip that round. For the opening chapter of the game, this subway station represents an outside world that you cannot access. It taunts and teases you by showing trains rumbling past the background while denying you access. It’s a big fat cork that keeps you trapped in a bottle. It tells you that, for the time being, you need to turn around, go back down the street, and continue your investigation!

Tomorrow I will make a slightly clumsy logical leap into talking about the nature of trains being tied to fixed routes.

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The mode of transportation can vary wildly – a broken mast in A Link to the Past, a chartered helicopter in Dead Rising, the dreams of an extinct civilisation in Final Fantasy X – and of course some proportion of games begin with a train journey. What might surprise you is that the games that begin with a train journey are usually totally excellent. I wouldn’t say that starting a game with a train journey makes the game good in itself, but I might suggest that people who make good games understand that trains are excellent. We will begin by looking at a game series that is all about railroading: Half-Life.

The opening scene of Half-Life made waves at the time by establishing Valve’s now-standard practice of forgoing cut-scenes and always giving the player full control of their character. In practice during this tram ride, the player only has control over what they are looking at – something I’ve written a lot about in the past – but it demonstrates four common thematic elements of Trains In Games that I’ll be coming back to over the next few days.

1) Trains transport people

Gordon Freeman’s first-day-at-work tram ride into Black Mesa is a psychological voyage into another world. The player is treated to a slideshow of what is to come – the office space with vending machines and mysterious men in suits, the helicopter in the canyon, the robot working in a pit of luminous green liquid – and comes to a rest in a mysterious dark chamber far removed from the outside world. The distance travelled, the advanced technology on display and the heavy security systems that are in place all signify to the player that they have left normality behind.

2) Trains travel along fixed routes

This is great news for game designers because it gives them a lot of authorial control over when and how the player experiences game content. Even in an open world game like Grand Theft Auto, as soon as the player steps onto a train they can control where the player will go and how they will get there – the principle seems to be that, if you want to benefit from the speed and convenience of a train, you must sacrifice control over your journey. This is important for the Half-Life intro because it forces the player to witness each of these scene-setting vignettes in order – hoping that, amongst other things, they notice the mysterious G-Man appearing repeatedly.

3) Trains represent technology

This might seem like an odd claim to make in a game about warp research and alien invasion, but I think it holds up in the sense that the tram system – particularly with regard to the huge blast doors that help to buffer loading times between areas – is ridiculous. This is a standard of light transport system that is the traditional reserve of rich megalomaniacs with secret lairs hidden inside volcanoes. It impresses upon you that Black Mesa is a sprawling, well-funded facility where Serious Business takes place. Throughout the examples I use this week, you may notice that trains are often used in this way, to signify the level of technology available to the society in which they are produced.

4) Trains are restrictive spaces

While train networks represent freedom of movement between distant locations, trains themselves are very close environments. Carriages – which are already quite thin – are usually crammed full of seats, tables, private rooms, or cargo, leaving very little room to maneuver, and their linear topography means that players generally only have a choice between moving in two directions: forward or back. Similar to the earlier point about fixed routes, this factors into the tram scene in that the player can’t really go anywhere or do anything EXCEPT look at the curious activity taking place around the tram.

The tram ride scene was so effective, so memorable, that Valve gave it a callback in Half-Life 2. Play begins with Gordon arriving by train at the oppressive urban occupied zone of City 17, stepping out into a cavernous Soviet-era railway station which has been retrofitted with a maze of wire fences and alien surveillance equipment. This train ride is a lot shorter than in the previous game – most of the scene-setting takes place as you walk through the station’s ‘security’ processes, experiencing the powerlessness of living in a police state – but it takes on the character of a poisoned arrow being shot into the heart of a brutal regime. Its deadly payload of hope and rebellion are spread by the player throughout the city, causing Dr. Breen’s administration to wither and die.

Similar things can be said about the opening scene of Final Fantasy VII, in which a terrorist group known as Avalanche infiltrate the elitist city-state of Midgar by riding a train up from the slums below, and launch a devastating attack on one of the city’s power plants. Again trains represent a mode of transport, between the impoverished slums and the high-tech metropolis overhead; again they reflect this society’s technological achievements, as characters use computer terminals to view 3D maps of the line; again they play on the sensations of claustrophobia and loss of control, as the group trigger a security alarm and can only evade capture by running back through the train carriages.

There are a number of other notable train scenes throughout the game. Immediately after the bombing mission, Avalanche regroup on a train going back to the slums (and intimidate the poor commuters with their guns and bad attitudes). The party’s first visit to the Gold Saucer theme park builds to a romantic cable-car ride around the park, which puts another spin on the close environment of a train car – the intimacy of sharing your personal space. Later, the tension of the North Corel train chase hangs on the fact that the player is locked on a collision course with a small town, and cannot divert the speeding locomotive. In fact, probably the most interesting train reference in the game is metaphorical – as the adventure grows more and more hazardous, the party keep urging each other forward with the (rather ironic) phrase “There ain’t no getting offa this train we’re on!”

Moving away from this theme of trains delivering revolutionary agents into oppressive societies – or not, depending on your point of view – the original Animal Crossing begins with the player having a chance encounter with a friendly dog while travelling to their new forest home. This scene is a rare example of a chance encounter with a fellow passenger – Rover the dog, in this instance – which is a feature of public transport little explored in games, other than to drop a MacGuffin in the player’s lap. Animal Crossing does this too, of course – following your conversation, Rover introduces you to Tom Nook, who immediately press-gangs you into the life of indentured serfdom that provides much of the impetus of the game.

The other great use of the train in Animal Crossing was as the means of transport between different players’ towns. Players began the game by loaded their own town from memory card slot A, visited the train station, and went on a magical journey to the town in memory card slot B. Chance encounters continue with each journey, as the player meets elusive characters such as Rover, and Blanca the faceless cat, whose conversations help to mask the loading process of the destination town. But the focus here – the symbolism of the train – is the idea of trains as a means of transportation, the sole link between these otherwise-inaccessible locales. Speaking as someone from a rural town with a good train station, it is something I can relate to.

Rolling with this theme, tomorrow’s article will look at other notable instances of trains being used as a means of metaphorical transportation. I bet you can’t wait!

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I’m not an expert on trains by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve never gone out of my way to look at or ride a particular train (with the exception of the miniature train loop at Newby Hall), but I have a real fondness for rail travel that could explain why I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. My grandad was a tank engine driver and my dad is a trainspotter, so you could say that trains run in my blood. Not literally, of course – that would be horrifying! And probably not in any kind of biological sense, because I don’t think that kind of higher-order knowledge can be passed down genetically. I think it’s fair to say, however, that trains feature heavily in my family’s cultural heritage.

When I was young I was taught about Stephenson’s Rocket, and the other innovations in steam engineering that were made in the proud North East. I used to watch Thomas the Tank Engine religiously and give myself small electric shocks while playing clumsily with my dad’s model trains. When I left high school I bought railcards instead of driving lessons, and spent around eight years exploring the UK in these snaking steel chariots. I once even paid Amtrak £300 for an all-access ticket to ride around the US for a month, and rode from New York to Seattle via Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco (NB. For some reason they charged me an additional fee when travelling from San Francisco to Seattle, and even the ticketmistriss at the Amtrak station said it was diabolical and advised me to never travel with Amtrak again). I could talk about regional differences in train culture across Europe and the US, but this blog is not the place for that! Suffice to say: I like trains.

Recently a reader commented that they were surprised to learn that anyone enjoyed Star Fox 64 (I don’t usually call it Lylat Wars since usually only Europeans understand what that is). In writing my response, I started thinking about my favourite moments in the game, and I found myself drawn back to one level in particular: Macbeth! In this mission, the bold captain Fox McCloud drops down into the heart of a Venomian military base inside a small tank, and shoots seven bells out of a massive supply train carrying ordinance and prototype weapons. It was awesome. The train is one of the largest enemies in the game, and provides the same sense of focused, systematic demolition as level 3 of R-Type. I love levels like that, where the boss is so large that they are the environment and you must crawl around like an insect and take them apart piece by piece – it’s a kind of narrative that’s popular in Western culture, that David and Goliath tale of the righteous underdog defeating an overwhelming enemy.

Inspired by this, I’d like to dedicate this week to writing about my favourite instances of Trains In Games, focusing on a different aspect of their portrayal each day. Come back tomorrow, when we will begin at the beginning!

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