The party is stripped right down to three characters – bubbly thief Rikku, skeptical swordfighter Paine, and wistful heroine Yuna. All three girls are available from the start of the game, following an opening sequence that resembles a James Bond title sequence set to a JPop soundtrack. All three girls can train in any job that the player has collected (although, disappointingly, outside of the battle the game always shows them in their ‘official’ job outfits, shown above).

With such a small group, you get a very strong feeling for how the girls relate to each other. Rikku and Yuna are old friends from their FFX days, and they spend a lot of time talking about their former associates. Paine is the outsider of the group, but she’s comfortable with that – she’s focused on the job, and has no interest in discussing her personal life, or her past. Rikku is quite happy-go-lucky and often tries to persuade Yuna to live dangerously and act like a hero, while Paine is objective and pragmatic, always turning conversations back to the mission at hand. Most of the emotional development in the game is therefore provided by Yuna, who often finds herself caught between her two friends.

FFX told the story of Yuna’s early life as the High Summoner, a sort of Dalai Lama figure who was expected to save the world from total destruction. The game charted her pilgrimage across the world of Spira, from her seaside village on Besaid Island to the ancient ruined city of Zanarkand – if you look at a map of the game world, you can probably see that the game is geographically quite linear. Her whole life was laid out in front of her – almost literally, in a straight line.

In FFX-2 Yuna has already saved the world, escaped the life of the High Summoner, and is now a young woman who is free to choose her own destiny. Her life has become a lot less certain, and it shows in the way that everyone she meets expects different things from her. When monsters attack, the people of Spira expect the High Summoner to drop out of the sky and save them; When treasure is detected, her captain expects her to go forth and steal it; When a concert promoter loses workers and equipment in a bandit raid, Yuna is asked to do everything from selling tickets to performing as the headline act.

But what does Yuna want? As she comes to terms with her newfound independence, she spends much of the game pondering this question – particularly with regard to her relationship with Tidus, the now-dead protagonist of FFX. Cutscenes throughout the game are narrated by Yuna’s internal monologue as she has one-sided conversations with her dead lover:

“So many things seem intertwined. But nothing leads to you. Why be a sphere hunter if what I’m hunting for can never be found?”

Listening to her private thoughts makes you feel like you’re peeking into her diary – it contributes to the game’s sense of intimacy. She loves Tidus… loved Tidus… but should she hold on to her feelings and continue to search for him, or get over her loss and move on? Her predicament is mirrored in that of the game’s antagonist, a hunky young Blitzball player called Shuyin who, as it happens, died 1,000 years ago. Shuyin and his lover Lenne have a lot in common with Tidus and Yuna, not least their physical appearances. They were killed together at the height of a great war, but Shuyin’s spirit refused to pass on to the afterlife without Lenne – his ghost has spent a millennium wallowing in rage and sorrow, and has now returned to exact his revenge by destroying the world.

Shuyin clearly represents the dangers that Yuna faces if she continues to cling to the past, refusing to accept that Tidus is dead. If there is an antithetical character in the game, it is probably Wakka – Yuna’s childhood friend, who during the course of the game comes to terms with his brother’s death and vows to be a good father to his newborn son. It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that the ‘good’ ending of FFX-2 involves Yuna saying goodbye to Tidus’ ghost and looking ahead to a future without him.

The problem I have is that there’s a special ‘perfect’ ending where Tidus is brought back from the dead and they are reunited. I know I’m being a real killjoy here, but this magical fairytale romance ending really put me off! After 40 hours following a story that is all about letting go of the past and moving on with your life, your ultimate reward is to have that message swept out the window. Sometimes, if you want it badly enough, dead people can come back to life! You can turn back the clock on your relationship and start over! It’s shameful fanservice fluff that undermines the entire game in my opinion.

That aside, I enjoyed it. I did have issues with some of the FF traditions they failed to cut – level grinding, occasional bosses with ludicrously unfair abilities, secret equipment that reduces the game to trivial effort – but there’s a lot of stuff I really loved. The side-quests are a lot of fun, and all have their own special briefing and debriefing scenes that go beyond the usual conversation-in-a-pub that normally take place. The girls are a likeable bunch, and the supporting cast are just the right amount of quirky (the weakest characters seem to be the NPC hangers-on from FFX, who only seem to exist in order to wrap up their loose ends from the previous game).

The thing that I’m realling coming away from this game with is that it feels very feminine. Not just because of the all-female cast, but the way all of the stories are about negotiation, making actual decisions, and changing relationships – not just ploughing through a linear course of action and imposing your will onto the world. Plus it spends a lot more time than most games talking openly about feelings and relationships and stuff, mostly from Yuna’s point of view but also from characters like Lulu (the mother of Wakka’s child, who wonders what kind of father he will turn out to be) and Dona (a former summoner who has fallen out with her repressed admirer Barthello). In FFX-2, Square-Enix have done a good job of portraying female perspectives without falling back on dumb stereotypes (much).

Currently I’m putting out three or four new microgames a week, usually while stretched out in front of the TV. Some of my ‘projects’ have taken a few days to complete – I tend to spend a long time fiddling with sprites, so animation can take a long time – but generally I can go from having an idea to shipping the game to my friends in about 90 minutes. And even that feels like quite a long time, under the circumstances.

I think anyone who is at all interested in game design or production should play this game! One of the most repeated comments about the Wario Ware Inc. series is that it dismantles the gameplay sequences of normal games (eg. jump on the koopa troopa and then dodge a fireball and then collect the coins) and spits them out as individual gameplay events (eg. GAME 1: Jump on a koopa troopa, GAME 2: Dodge a fireball, GAME 3: Collect the coins). Wario DIY basically does the same thing with regard to game design! Instead of thinking about the big picture (which I think most people tend to do), it grabs you by the collar and forces you to focus on these individual moments of gameplay and screams in your ear “IS THIS FUN?!”

Unfortunately I think this game is going to vanish from public awareness pretty quickly, and will probably end up as a sort of insider club for dedicated enthusiasts. There are two things wrong with Wario DIY.

First: FRIEND CODES! These have been the biggest speed bump on Nintendo’s online service ever since they were first implemented. It’s not too difficult to register a set of codes, but it is a pain to have unique codes for EVERY SINGLE GAME, but the real reason they screw up Wario DIY is that they SEVERELY restrict the sharing of games. Other content-sharing games (eg. Little Big Planet) have online databases that anyone can access, giving every player access to millions of man-hours worth of content. I would LOVE to be able to browse through all the random junk that other players are making, but because of Nintendo’s child-friendly online policy I can only share games with a couple of my friends. It’s so patronising to treat adult customers like fragile little children!

Second: Nintendo barely seem to be advertising the game! I only became aware of its existance after reading dessgeega’s blog post about it. Part of me thinks that they could even want to sweep it under the rug a little, since it’s such a ‘game for gamers’ – it certainly doesn’t fit into their “IF YOU LIKE PROFESSOR LAYTON THEN YOU’LL LOVE THE LEGEND OF ZELDA” advertising nonsense¹. Poking around, it turns out they talked about it at E3 last year… now I’ve seen the video, I do have vague memories of getting excited about it with my friends, but in the 11 months between then and the release date I haven’t heard a peep.

I can’t very easily show off any of the games I’ve made on here (although I have seen ‘microgame management’ tools that can be used to edit roms of Wario DIY and hence trade microgames via PC), but one other thing I would like to mention is adult content.

I design my games according to a few simple principles. I’ll write more about it later someday, but basically I start with a gameplay hook, keep the graphics simple, and then throw in some special effects whenever the player does anything. My natural inclination is to keep everything family-friendly, because there’s enough sex and violence in games already. I think it’s an interesting design exercise to look at the games you are playing, identify the violent content (eg. jumping on a koopa troopa, dodging a fireball, possibly even collecting coins if you consider it forceful misappropriation) and then think of ways the gameplay could be recontextualised to remove the violence (eg. jumping on a trampoline, dodging a wedding bouquet, collecting litter… although even these could probably be construed as violent if you thought about it long enough – why are you dodging a bouquet? Will you be FORCED to get married if you catch it?).

Anyway, a few days ago I decided to throw all that out the window and try making a game that was needlessly violent and shocking. Big game companies do it all the time, so I think it was a justifiable experiment. In my game, the player is presented with a close-up view of a woman’s exposed chest, and must tap on her breasts to create a series of cuts around her nipples. When each breast has a full circle of cuts, the game is won and the player is given a ‘reward’ animation in which a hand sweeps across the screen and removes the nipples, leaving a bloody mess. EDGY!

Now that I’ve finished the game and sent it out to a select group of my friends, I have to say the whole experience has left me feeling a bit depressed. I’ve read a few reports about how some Rockstar employees felt really uncomfortable about making Manhunt, and I can sympathise with them (although obviously my game is on a totally different scale). I deliberately pushed myself to make a game about sexual violence against women because it’s pretty much the last thing I would normally want to do, and I’ve learned that… I should trust my instincts!

This kind of thing is a good example of why Wario DIY is great. It’s amazing how much insight into game design you can get from these squiggly little four-second microgames. I just wish they’d open it up to the public, so it could spark off a global ‘conversation’ about gameplay, and give people some hands-on experience of how and why games are made.

Oh, and in case you’re thinking “Clearly they need friend codes to prevent children from stumbling upon sick filth like your breast-slicing game!”, I’d like to add that it’s because of the restricted content sharing that I felt ‘safe’ to publish the game. I wouldn’t have released it it if I thought it would be widely available (which is still a possibility I suppose, in the unlikely event that it goes viral).

……

¹ Seriously, compare these UK adverts for Ocarina of Time and Spirit Tracks. It’s good that they’ve progressed from denigrating female players to putting them on screen, but why pretend that it’s a casual game? Why do they never show her fighting monsters?! It’s like they still can’t admit that girls enjoy ‘hardcore’ games too. And it totally misrepresents the game, which is bad advertising in my opinion.

Nintendo:

• The main item will obviously be the ’3DS’, or whatever they call it. That’s not really a prediction, but this is: there will be no mention of the HD Wii that they are obviously developing, because they want to keep the media focused on their new handheld.
• They’ll reveal the first real details about the new Zelda game. Again, that is a dead cert, but my prediction is that it will follow the standard Zelda template exactly except for one special game mechanic (eg. that your sword turns into a woman), which will look brilliant in their presentation but turn out to be a pointless gimmick when the game is released. This is pretty much what happened with Twilight Princess, and it sold well.
• Cammie Dunaway will say something slightly wrong and misogynistic nerds around the world will be utterly infuriated.
• The 3DS will move towards the Wii’s target demographic. There will be at least one Wii Fit/Wii Sports/Wii Music style genteel lifestyle game shown. Perhaps something with a pedometer that keeps track of your running.
• Speaking of which, I can’t remember if the 3DS has already been confirmed to have Mii support, but I think it’s a strong possibility. You should be able to send transfer Miis between the 3DS and the Wii, but Nintendo have a terrible record when it comes to using Miis so I’m not holding my breath.
• We will learn less about Pokémon Black/White than viewers of Pokémon Sunday do every week.

Microsoft:

• Natal is due out this year, so Microsoft will be focusing on that. There’ll be a lot of terrible-looking games that are designed to use it to the full (as per Project Hammer and the Wii remote), a small number of really great looking games that use it only a little (top contender: Fable III), and a curious set of games designed to compete with Wii Fit/Wii Sports/etc.
• This last category of ‘lifestyle’ games will enrage core 360 gamers and set loads of PS3 owners into utterly uncalled-for fits of giggles.
• Sonic 4 will be held up in a strange attempt to show that the 360 is still the console of choice for the OLD-SCHOOL HARDCORE gamers. As if Sonic was ever a hardcore game and not just a primary-coloured fairground ride.
• Similarly, there’ll be a LOT of stuff about Halo: Reach (since it’s pretty much wrapped up and ready to go by now), but there’ll be very little mention of whatever new multiplatform projects Bungie are working on.
• There’ll be some Mass Effect 3 teasers, but they won’t tell us much more than the end sequence of Mass Effect 2. There’ll be a really long Gears of War 3 trailer, and it will look even dumber than Gears of War 2. In fact, once you throw in Fable III, their main game lineup will be very similar to E3 2008, but with all the numbers incremented by 1.
• This year’s ill-conceived musical guest will be Justin Bieber; he will fluff his lines and end up talking about his favourite Pokémon.
• Justin Bieber’s favourite Pokémon is Dialga.

Sony:

• Nintendo are selling the 3DS; Microsoft are selling Natal; Sony are selling the PlayStation Move. The PS Move has been ridiculed widely in gaming circles, but once Sony put some games on the table I think it will emerge as the clear choice for ‘hardcore’ games. It provides the freedom of Natal with the direct interface options of the Wii remote, without sacrificing speed or precision. Games journalists will spend the week playing with all three systems and describe the PS Move as the ‘surprise winner’.
• I think the PS3 has been eating into the 360′s market share over the last year or so, and Sony will want to build momentum on this by highlighting the franchises that were previously 360 exclusives. Unlike Microsoft, Sony will want to make as much noise as possible about any multiplatform Bungie games they can get their hands on.
• Besides the PS Move, Sony’s other main announcement will be 3DTV stuff. They’ll push this harder than expected because it’s something the other consoles aren’t really touching on yet. Their 3D games (and I hope Warhawk is one of them) will get a mixed reaction but that doesn’t matter because nobody will actually buy a 3DTV any time this year.
• There will probably be some attempt to revitalise the PSP, since the PSP Go turned out to be exactly the kind of absurd mess that everyone was expecting. I think they’ll keep it quite low-key this year, partly because they don’t want to admit how badly they messed up and partly just to keep the media focused on the PS3 and HDTV.
• Little Big Planet 2 will look excellent.
• There will be some vague new information about The Last Guardian. Whatever is shown – and I mean anything – will drive muso gamers around the world absolutely wild. Nobody else will care.#

EDIT: Since writing this, I’ve read over some other people’s predictions and I don’t think I’ve missed much. I do think I’ve been a bit conservative, but whatever. The only thing I’ve read about that I want to add to this post is Monday Night Combat… this looks great! It appears to be the bastard child of TF2 and Smash TV, two of my favourite games. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong with it, but a lot of potential excellence too.

There was never any doubt that I would buy Mass Effect 2 as soon as it came out and go absolutely crazy playing it over and over again. The strange thing was that, because Mass Effect is both quite long and highly replayable, I was never particularly bothered about when that day would come – whenever I got the urge to dive back into that universe, I would just start a new game and look for new things to try. Two years on, the sequel appeared almost before I was ready, prompting a last-minute dash to level 60 and that final achievement. I probably could have kept playing for another year before I got bored of it. Still, the sequel is out, and most obsessive fans will have finished it at least twice by now. I myself am currently 70% through my second play-through, wading through ‘Insane’ mode and figuring out all the bare knuckle combat exploits that just aren’t necessary at lower difficulties.

I get the feeling that most of the gameplay changes have been directly shaped by player feedback from the original game. The sequel feels a lot more linear, possibly as a part of the general trend to stop hiding content from players – which was certainly a major element in Mass Effect. Your ultimate objective, outlined at the start of the game, is to travel through a quarantined mass relay into an unexplored region of space and shut down an alien plot to abduct human colonies, and this never really develops much over the course of the game. Most of the plot and intrigue occurs during the 40-odd hours you spend preparing for this final attack – recruiting team members, earning their trust, upgrading your ship, and investigating the aliens responsible for the abduction.

It seems strange that Bioware would build the game around such a straightforward, almost entirely twist-free central plot. One of the best things about the original game was that its modular story would adapt itself around your chosen route through the game – the four main missions each contained a vital piece of information, all of which must be combined in order to locate the Big Bad’s secret base and take the fight to him. In Mass Effect 2 you just seem to fly around the universe ticking off items from a shopping list, with sudden spurts of deus ex machina shunting the story along when you reach certain milestones. It’s a bit disappointing really.

Similarly, the side-missions and planetary exploration gameplay have been streamlined into a much simpler format. I know a lot of people complained about how many hours were spent driving around barren landscapes in the Mako, but I was surprised to find it completely absent in the sequel. The boring, pointless task of surveying mineral deposits now takes place through an equally boring and pointless scanning probe minigame played in orbit, while the planets you can land on have been transformed into linear romps down fenced-off trails. This allows a much greater degree of directive control over the mission and its environment – certainly a big improvement over the featureless moons and identikit warehouses that plagued the original – but you do lose some possibilities for interesting missions, such as on the planet of the space monkeys.

Plot missions are shorter in the sequel, but much greater in number. Most are recruitment missions, which involve going to a city, finding someone who can tell you how to find the person you’re looking for, then travelling to a linear combat area and killing whatever group(s) of people are preventing them from leaving. Each crew member comes with an optional ‘loyalty mission’ that unlocks a new, Cerberus-themed outfit and a unique bonus skill; these usually involve another linear killing spree, then an interesting scene in which your crewmate’s dark secrets are revealed, and then a final conversation where you choose whether or not to allow them to kill some figure from their past. The stories that unfold during these loyalty missions lead to the most interesting moments in the game, which do make up for the repetitive mission structure, but in some cases it leaves you feeling like the combat is an arbitrary chore they wedged into the mission just to swallow up your time and effort, so that it feels like more of an achievement when you reach the end.

All of this sounds a bit bleak and boring, but the bulk of Mass Effect 2‘s gameplay is a great improvement over its predecessor. The bloated inventory system has been almost entirely removed and replaced with an armour customisation system that is brilliantly designed but slightly underwhelming in terms of options. The skill system has been simplified, although the range of skills available has greatly increased. The biggest improvements are found in combat, where weapons and skills now enjoy varying efficacy against health, armour, shields and biotic barriers. ‘Thermal clips’ restrict how much ammo you can carry, invariably not quite as much as you’d like to, which encourages you to switch between weapons and vary your strategies much more.

It’s just a shame that they couldn’t make these improvements without delivering a such a weakened narrative. One of Mass Effect 2‘s talking points is that anyone and everyone in your crew, including your character, can be permanently killed at certain points of the game, but most of these deaths feel really random and undeserved – it doesn’t come close to the drama of Mass Effect‘s Virmire mission. The closing cut-scenes include some pretty big hints about what is to come in Mass Effect 3, and it looks brilliant… unfortunately, it comes across as a slap in the face when 10 seconds of CGI is more exciting than the 40 hours of game you have to play through in order to see it.

I suspect that Mass Effect 2 will eventually be remembered as the weak link in the trilogy. It’s a great game, but it feels like filler material – a public playtest of new combat mechanics, in preparation for a show-stopping second sequel.

Again.

2009 seemed like a pretty weak year for games. I’m not sure how coloured my views are by the fact I couldn’t afford to buy many new titles, but when I look back at what I’ve been playing, the only games released last year were:

• Street Fighter IV (looks ugly; plays great; less depth than SF3 but easier to get into)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (wonderful – better than the original in every way)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii (not very challenging; co-op is fun but hard to co-ordinate)
• Torchlight (excellent Diablo clone – totally unoriginal, but good if you enjoy grinding)
• Dragon Age: Origins (a fierce throwback to infuriating dungeon-crawl RPGs of yore)
• GTA: The Lost and Damned (good fun, except for the repetitive missions)
• Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II (a series of good ideas ruined in fascinating ways)

There have been a few other games I wanted to play but missed out on (Little King’s Story, Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box and GTA: Chinatown Wars come to mind) but one way or another I’m sure I’ll get my hands on them eventually.

In 2010, I’m looking forward to Bayonetta, Mass Effect 2, Monster Hunter Tri, Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver, Dead Rising 2, Final Fantasy XIII, Brink, Fable III, that Miles Edgeworth game, Splinter Cell: Conviction if it ever sees the light of day, Super Street Fighter IV although I’ll be annoyed when they inevitably try to charge £40 for it,  rumours abound of GTA V popping up in time for Christmas, and hopefully we’ll get a PAL release of Muscle March.

Also in 2010, I’m going to continue learning to use UnrealEd and Hammer and fiddling around in Game Maker. I have begun doing some research into using games as an occupational therapy activity – more on that in a future post – which may eventually evolve into some kind of PhD project. But more importantly than all that, I have vowed that this is the year in which I will finally capture my first Mew.

At the time, I was excited enough just to be using a PC. There was no internet connection, and the computer refused to run Warcraft II, but for a time I was quite happy to just noodle around in Windows and DOS. Probably the most exciting activity we could legitimately engage in was to browse Encarta for interesting multimedia clips – I was going to make a joke about this, but to this day I like to idle away time on Wikipedia when I’m bored.

Anyway, events took a dramatic turn one day when a friend came into school with wide eyes and a floppy disk, telling wild stories about a exciting program he had stumbled upon. That program was QBASIC, an IDE created by Microsoft and distributed with later versions of DOS – we all had a copy at home, since we had all installed DOS from the same disks. Later that day, we crowded around the library computer as he revealed the contents of his disk. He had written a simple game about anagrams… a jumble of letters would appear, and the player had to type in the unscrambled word or phrase. There was no randomisation, just a simple model of:

- Display a phrase
- (Wait for player input)
- If the input is correct, move on to the next phrase; if not, then repeat the current phrase

It was a terrible game, but we were all interested by the idea of writing our own programs. Like many British schoolchildren of a certain age, we had a little experience of writing BASIC code on a BBC Micro in maths class, but this was another world. We all went home that afternoon and began teaching ourselves to code from the Help files – copy/pasting code samples, fiddling with their parameters and observing the results, that sort of thing.  We were also delighted to find some sample games were included – NIBBLES (which was basically Snake) and GORILLAS (which was basically Artillery). Both games were far too complicated for us to understand the inner workings of, but they shined a light on what could be achieved.

Soon, we had all mastered the same handful of commands:

- CLS (clears the screen)
- PRINT (used to write messages on the screen)
- INPUT (allows the user to type things in)
- IF [...] THEN (allows conditional commands – used to create logic gates)
- GOTO (jumps the program to the specified line number)
- END (ends the program)

We used line numbers to create ‘bookmarks’ for useful blocks of code (although in practice we tended to number every line), and learned that putting $ on the end of a word created a string variable (used to store text in speech marks – eg. name$ = “Buck Handsome”) and putting a % on the end of a word created an integer variable (used for numbers, without speech marks – eg. age% = 47), which could be manipulated using normal maths. And if you followed all of that, you already have all the tools you need to create your own games in BASIC.

A simple program would look something like this:

10 CLS
20 PRINT “What is the capital of Burkina Faso?”
30 INPUT answer$
40 IF answer$ = “Ouagadougou” THEN GOTO 60
50 GOTO 10
60 END

QBASIC programs run as a linear sequence of commands. You can read it very simply, like a book – start at the first line, and simply follow the instructions, line by line. If you ran this program, it would keep asking you to name the capital of Burkina Faso until you gave the correct answer, whereupon the program would end.

The important thing, from a ‘game’ perspective, is the logic gate created by lines 40 and 50. If the answer is correct, the program jumps ahead to line 60; if the answer is anything else, the program continues to line 50, which loops back to the start. The IF [...] THEN command is a simple tool for evaluating the player’s input – it facilitates the success/failure dynamic which underpins traditional gameplay, and can be layered up to create intricate logic trees. It is what makes this program a ‘game’, even if it is a rubbish, simple game. If you removed lines 40 and 50, the player could type in any answer and the program would always react in the same way, destroying any notions of interactivity, consequences and agency.

To get back to my story, I had a moment of clarity one day – I think it was Easter bank holiday, 1995 – and realised that I could use the random number function to simulate dice rolls. By tracking enough variables (x position, y position, hit points, maximum hit points, magic points, maximum magic points, attack, defence, etc), I could therefore model a simple role-playing game, inspired by boardgames such as Talisman and Hero Quest. This was a far more ambitious project than anything my friends and I had previously attempted, but since it was a long weekend and I had nothing better to do, I dived right in and came back to school on Tuesday with a bugged, but complete, first version of Land of the Lotus.

The game was still terrible – a single, square room, 3×3 tiles large, containing one immobile enemy who could only attack in response to the player’s attacks. But it had a locked door with a working key, three different player classes, and pleasingly generic gameplay. Its pokey little ASCII graphics didn’t quite suggest a living world, but a comatose world that occasionally twitched its fingers, at least. I was overjoyed!

I showed my friends and some of us got together and tried to build on this success – personally, I don’t think I got round to completing any other games, although I wrote a few little applications to crunch numbers for Warhammer and the like. For one of my friends, QBASIC was the starting point for a career in games programming (although he mostly uses C++ these days), and others – including myself – still use the same basic skills it taught us when writing scripts. The moral of this story is that I think QBASIC is a simple and fun way to learn basic principles of procedural logic. It won’t teach you much of anything about object-orientated programming, but on the other hand you can learn everything you need to know to get a game running in just five minutes.

Later this week At some future point in time, I will upload Land of the Lotus: HD Remix, an updated version of the game I threw together 14 years ago, along with the source code. It’s still not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve ironed out the bugs, improved the interface, re-written most of the in-game text and annotated my code. And it’s still better than some of the things you’ll find on XBox Live Marketplace.

The above image shows the three rival motion control systems in action. (Click on it to see a larger version)

Sony will use the existing PlayStation Eye set-top camera/microphone and give users a little plastic wand with a glowing ball on one end, presumably with some buttons on the wand itself. The camera seems to identify your coloured ball and the relative direction of the wand and calculates the angle and position at which it is being held. Their tech demos involved using the wand to swing swords, torches, tennis rackets and other items around.

Microsoft’s exotically-named Project Natal is basically a pair of cameras and a microphone array. A conventional camera sees visible light, while the other uses infra-red light to create a kind of depth-map image. These two images can be used to calculate a kind of pseudo-3D skeletal tracking system, amongst other things. And the microphones are apparently quite good, although since most of the voice-recognition stuff will be software based (I think), the actual quality will probably vary from game to game.

Nintendo, of course, have the Wii remote. A ‘sensor bar’ containing two infra-red lights sits next to your TV and your controller contains a sensor that can see their position and calculate its angle and position. Nintendo are currently building on the Wii remote’s capabilities by way of the Motion Plus add-on, which adds a gyroscope into the mix for added rotational accuracy.

I’ve read a lot of comments to the effect that Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s motion control wand thing are just late-arriving knock-offs of the Wii remote. It’s a massive over-simplification that takes no account of their unique features, but I think there’s some truth in it.

Microsoft have said recently that it was always their plan to reach out to families and non-gamers, and that the previous brute force, high-def, hardcore profile of the 360 was always merely the first step in their long-term plan; I expect someone at Sony has made similar comments about how they’ve been developing camera technology for years now, as if they have always intended to release a motion control peripheral.

I’m sure both companies have been developing these technologies for many years now, but I’m also pretty sure that neither would have considered putting so much emphasis on them if the Wii proven to be such a phenomenal success. After all, the XBox Live Vision Camera and the PS Eye have both been around for years, but hardly any games have been made that really make use of them – have YOU played TotemBall? Clearly neither company has really wanted to push them as control devices until the last year or two.

In fact, the technology used in both new products seems to be quite old. A quick search on YouTube reveals videos of Richard Marks – creator of the EyeToy – demonstrating both the motion control wand and infra-red depth mapping back in 2004.

PS3 Motion Control Wand

Natal-like Infra-Red Depth Mapping

My understanding is that either of these systems could have been introduced years ago, if Sony or Microsoft had given them adequate support at the time – it took the runaway success of the Wii to make them sit up and take motion-sensitive interfaces seriously. But while they certainly appear to be reactions to the Wii remote, the actual interfaces are totally different – almost incomparable, in some regards. So if anyone tells you that they’re just Wii remote knock-offs, I would ask you to slap them in the face.

I assume that everyone reading this blog has used a Wii remote by now. You can wave it around, it has some buttons on it (although only the A and B buttons are in a comfortable position for regular use) and you can point it at your sensor bar to use a cursor. There is an expansion slot, although the only expansion worth talking about is the nunchuck, which just seems to be a concession for traditional gamers who still want to use an analogue stick. You can also turn it on its side and use it like a wireless NES pad, but very few people seem interested in this – the only (non-virtual console) game I ever play like this is Metal Slug Anthology.

It’s interesting that you can’t use all of these features at the same time. You can’t swing your remote around and keep it pointed at the screen, for instance. Even flagship first-party games like Super Mario Galaxy and Zelda: Twilight Princess don’t stray too far away from traditional control systems, and only really dip into the Wii remote’s unique features for short periods (guiding Mario through a web of blue stars, firing Link’s bow, etc). Notably, the Wii remote’s motion sensing tends to function as a kind of ‘virtual button’ – a button that tells Link to swing his sword, or Mario to do his funny little spin attack.

Natal and the PSEye take a different approach. While the Wii remote sits in your hand, detecting its movements and position and sending this information back to the console, these camera-based systems focus directly on the player. They have a lot in common – patents aside, I see no reason why Natal couldn’t handle a control wand of its own. The main difference is that the PSEye lacks Natal’s infra-red depth sensor, which means it can probably only track your body movements on a 2D plane – like in the old EyeToy Play games – while Natal (probably) can’t track handheld objects as naturally as the PSEye. And assuming the motion control wand has some buttons on it, PS3 players will also have a direct digital interface with their game, which would make a big difference.

What do they mean for games?

During their E3 media briefing, Microsoft unveiled this ‘product vision’. Don’t take it literally – it’s not footage of actual games, but a treatment of the kind of things you might expect from Natal.

So, what is their vision?

• Beat-em-up where you have to do actual kung-fu

• Racing game where you use an imaginary steering wheel

• Some kind of kaiju rampage game

• Penalty shoot-out game

• Skateboard game where you do tricks on an imaginary deck

• Virtual dress-up (with co-op over Live!)

• Quiz games

• Motion control dashboard interface

The beat-em-up is an obvious non-starter. You could probably get away with a Punch-Out style boxing sim, but any game that requires you to jump around and balance on one leg is going to end in tears – and lawsuits. The racing game would probably work – I gather there’s already a version of Burnout Paradise that can be played just using the camera. That said, you (apparently) control your speed using your feet, which makes me wonder how many people will have to move their coffee table across the room whenever they want to play. How many people have coffee tables, anyway? Valve regularly send out PC hardware surveys over Steam… perhaps Microsoft should start taking surveys of people’s living room furniture and lighting?

The kaiju game clip reveals one of the big problems I see for these camera-controlled systems. You can see the kid marching towards the TV, and the monster walking towards the screen in response, but the clip ends when the kid has just a few feet left in front of him. What happens next? It’s all very well being able to track skeletal movement, but players can only move around within a small area – usually, the space between their TV and their sofa. There are few in-game situations where this is adequate. As I will discuss later, designers will need to change their approach to motion if they want to keep presenting games in navigable 3D worlds.

Penalty shoot-outs? Fine. It might take some practice to learn where the virtual ball is, but perhaps you could put some kind of penalty spot on the floor. The skateboarding game suffers the earlier problem of jumping around, and I’m not sure how well players could do skateboard tricks with an imaginary skateboard – I’m not a skater, but I do have an A-level in physics, and I wonder how often players could ollie off a solid floor without breaking their ankles. The other features all seem feasible – if a little dull – but they hint towards the second big problem.

The one thing that all of these clips have in common is that every single controllable character is facing either directly into, or out of, the screen. This is a symptom of my second big problem with camera-controlled games – when placed beneath the TV, a camera will always be staring at the player’s front. Whatever gestures players might make, they will always be made in the direction of the screen, and I think many players would be a little put off if their characters weren’t facing the same direction, or mirrored back out of the screen.

Problem 1: Character Movement and Gestures

Character movement is something that I have yet to see any motion controlled game do well. In my opinion, Wii Sports remains one of the best showcases of the Wii’s motion control in action, but four of the five games require no movement whatsoever, and the tilt-to-sidestep boxing controls are only appropriate because you’re fighting in a confined space. Most Wii games get around this problem by either bringing in the nunchuck’s analogue stick or using some kind of point-and-click movement system, neither of which could be easily reproduced with just a camera.

Traditionally, players push on a d-pad, analogue stick, joystick or keyboard key to issue a kind of ‘movement impulse’ command. So long as you hold right on the d-pad, Mario will run towards the right of the screen; so long as you hold W, your Heavy Weapons Guy will keep plodding forward. Most other commands – kick, jump, use, shoot – are more like one-off instances. These are what you see a lot of in the product vision, because it’s relatively easy to equate a gesture (eg. you throwing a punch) with an in-game action (eg. Zangief throwing a punch). But following this kind of interface logic, maintaining an ‘impulse’ command – like pushing on an analogue stick to move – would equate to ‘posing’, rather than ‘gesturing’, and that doesn’t sound very immersive or intuitive at all.

I think the most common outcome will be that developers will create games that don’t require characters to move, in the conventional sense – games that are designed around a series of connected scenes, rather than contiguous 3D worlds. Think of games like Dragon’s Lair, Snatcher, Day of the Tentacle, or Mario Party, where you enter a scene, perform a few actions and maybe select an exit. This would tie in with the idea that motion-control systems are supposed to attract non-gaming audiences – after all, if people want to play traditional games, they can just pick up a control pad and play normally. There’s a great number of party game collections on the Wii that attest to this line of thinking.

I think a better solution is to develop games where movement is controlled through gestures. Thinking through the problem backwards, this means creating games that are controlled by instance-based commands rather than sustained impulses. The driving game is a good example – once you have a system to control your speed (Burnout‘s foot control is an intuitive solution, since it vaguely imitates the use of pedals in a car), the player only really uses gestures to indicate a change of direction. The young skateboarder builds up speed by making a ‘pushing’ gesture with his right foot, and presumably stops by putting his foot down to the side of his imaginary deck. Another example would be some kind of 3D flying game where the player moves their arms to flap their virtual wings – each instance of the ‘flap’ gesture would generate a certain amount of thrust, similar to Joust.

Of course, some styles of traditional game would be very well-suited to this kind of gesture-based control scheme – imagine a game like Black & White played using the kind of dragging and stretching gestures associated with the iPhone. As a former Warhammer player, I quite like the idea of running a miniature kingdom, streaking across fields and villages with one sweep of my mighty hand! Since these kinds of management/strategy/God games don’t anchor the player to particular characters, they can drag, push and flick their way around a full 3D environment without questioning the laws of physics – in a sense, the omnipotent player is manipulating and moving the game world around their static position. Of course this doesn’t address the problem of character movement, it just ducks around it. But because these kinds of games are navigated by a series of unique viewpoint adjustments rather than a perpetual motion, they are very well-suited to a gesture-based interface.

The biggest Natal project revealed so far – Lionhead’s Milo & Kate – uses a disembodied camera for this reason. It evades the problem of character control by addressing the player directly, as they stand in their living room. The central character romps around the environment according to their own ‘free will’ (and a liberal dose of scripting, no doubt) and has a window into the real world that matches the player’s window into the virtual. Whatever you think about the game itself, this is clearly the kind of progressive, user-friendly interface that Microsoft hope will sell the 360 to confused non-gamers, but it comes with its own caveats. Firstly, the player is now anchored to an NPC who may or may not agree to explore the game world – Milo & Kate continues Peter Molyneux’s campaign to create emotionally engaging characters instead of intellectually engaging rules. Secondly, without some kind of on-screen representation (a floating hand, a crosshair, a character), it’s difficult for players to judge their relative position within the game – see my comments on that penalty shoot-out clip – which is pretty essential for any kind of dynamic interaction.

The PS3′s motion control wand sits somewhere between Natal and the Wii remote. The most natural use for the device – as shown in all the tech demos – is to manipulate virtual hand-held items from a first-person perspective. This could be great! I’d love to play a cross between Orcs & Elves and Mazan. But at the same time, it seems a bit more restrictive than the totally controller-free Natal. As the Wii has demonstrated, focusing your game interface onto a handheld device makes the rest of your body seem a bit useless, like you’re operating a one-armed robot. Even having an analogue stick on the device would be a bit pointless, if you’re expected to wave it around while holding down directions. But since the PSEye can effect some degree of bodily tracking too, the final outcome depends on how well developers can bring all of its capabilities to work together.

Problem 2: Camera Orientation

The other thing that bothers me about these camera-controlled systems is the way that they stare directly out from underneath the screen. In my opinion, space in games is best represented in the X and Y axis, using the width and height of the screen, so that players can accurately judge distance and motion. Unfortunately, these cameras are always positioned to look along the Z axis, so this becomes the logical axis on which action should take place – after all, players want to act in the direction they are facing. This is a troublesome conflict of priorities. As a result, it can be assumed that players will always want to face the camera. Whenever designers start thinking about how their players will move, they will have to keep this weird Vitruvian Man model in mind.

Of course people will always experiment. Here’s a handy video taken from Sega SuperStars for the EyeToy:

See what a mess this is? The guy’s either twisting his head round – definitely not good for your neck – or facing the screen and fighting sideways, which just looks ridiculous. I used to wonder whether it would be worth moving the camera to face the player’s side, so they they could at least face the screen while attacking across it, but I’m not sure that would be much better. A key element of immersion is to minimise the amount of time that players spend ‘thinking outside the game’ – the time they spend asking themselves questions like ‘Where is the grenade button?’ or ‘What is my Heal gesture?’, for example. Any control system that rotates your movement around 90º would force players to mentally translate game events and their own reactions between the two planes, which would be hugely distracting.

Going back to the Vitruvian Man comparison, I think it’s also worth asking whether players will want to stand up and jump around whenever they want to play a game. I know I don’t. And while variety games like Wii Sports or Rayman: Raving Rabbids continue to drag people off their sofa for a few minutes at a time, you’d be hard pushed to find a ‘serious’ game that can’t be played while seated – I’m thinking of games like Mario, Zelda, and my beloved No More Heroes.  And I don’t think anyone would want to jump out of their seat and change a tyre whenever their friend decides to take a virtual pit stop.

At this stage, the precise capabilities of Natal are unclear, but if it really can track multiple players’ hand gestures then I think there’s some good potential for multiplayer games. Going back to the product vision video, the more realistic gaming situation can be seen in the quiz show game – the family are all sitting on the sofa, and the system is using facial recognition and motion tracking to keep track of which player is doing what. I think there’d be a great deal of interest in games that groups of players can enjoy from the comfort of their sofa – off the top of my head, maybe some kind of wizard duel game where you use hand gestures and keywords to cast spells. Come to think of it, that sounds like the ninjitsu techniques from Naruto… I wonder how long it will be before that game comes out?

Even then, there’s no way that a camera will ever be able to read gestures as quickly as a control pad can register button inputs. Gesture-controlled games must inevitably run at a slower pace than those with a digital interface – which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how much you enjoy studying frame data. The PS3′s motion control wand can bridge this gap a little with its mounted buttons, but Natal will always require a more relaxed sense of timing.

Wrapping Up

All in all, there’s no doubt that these new interface devices should lead to some interesting new game experiences. I don’t think they will totally reinvent gaming from the ground up, though. As I’ve said before, gamers love all the user-unfriendly junk that puts non-gamers off – the complex control schemes, the impossible AI opponents, the tedious stats. Milo & Kate looks interesting, and there’s no doubt I would buy it, but if I had to choose between it or Street Fighter IV, I’d pick Zangief any day of the week. I think most gamers would do the same.

That said, there’s plenty of scope for designers to build on existing game design principles, so long as they stay focused on the player’s experience. After all, there’s no point in building games around unique motion control features if people don’t enjoy playing them. Games should lessen their reliance on precise timing, and controls should be based on unique gestures rather than sustained commands. I wrote in my dissertation about how the development of 3D games led to player-characters becoming a focal object that often obstructs the player’s view of the game world… as camera-controlled games improve, I think it will often be a good idea to remove the on-screen player-character altogether.

Finally, following their continuing deviation away from the hardcore market, I think Sony and Microsoft will need to be careful not to alienate their core consumers with endless previews of touchy-feely ‘casual’ games. For their own sake, they need to maintain a balance between progressive, intuitive, gentle experiences, and punishing, hardcore challenges. In my experience, core gamers are responsible for the initial spread of new hardware, bringing it into homes and persuading their friends and relatives to give it a chance. It’s only after the sales figures have built up, people start coming out and talking about it to their friends at work, and a few key journalists have had a good go on their kids’ new Christmas presents, that we see the kind of mass market recognition and ballooning popularity that the Wii has enjoyed.

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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.

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 keep making jokes about them. One lead designer even went so far as to say that I didn’t seem passionate about games, which – I think this website shows – is a pretty ridiculous accusation. So from now on, I’m going to try to be a lot more po-faced in job interviews and suchlike. I expect a lot of people will think I’m nuts, but hopefully some of them will recognise me as the real deal.

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.