Jul 30, 2010

Grand Theft Auto IV Trailer

Lay Down Your Guns Writer Fraser Allison thinks a few games could be improved if they contained a little less shooting. We're reprinting the case here. Read on and see if you agree.

I love violent games.

I love shooting. I heart punching. I make "brrrm!" noises when I move tanks around, and cackle gleefully when I make those tanks demolish other tanks or buildings. Who cheers for war? I cheer for war.

If it's done well.

Luckily, violence is one of the easiest things to simulate in a videogame. People both inside and outside the culture of games wonder whether the popularity of realistic warfare simulators is a sign that today's youth are becoming brutalised (as though people haven't always been fascinated by war), but sit Jack Thompson, Michael Atkinson, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman down in a Basic Game Programming 101 class and I guarantee you they will all start by making a 2D shooter (if they think nobody is watching).

Sometimes, though, game developers seem to forget that combat still takes a bit of work to get right. Plenty of potentially good non-violent games have been hampered or outright ruined by the unnecessary addition of violent combat, often for no apparent reason except that it must seem like the safe option. When developers think of combat as an easy feature they can quickly add to their game at the end to round it out, like tutorials or music or writing (cough), they're risking more than the cost of implementing the shooting or brawling mechanics: the whole experience of their potentially awesome climby/jumpy/buildy game can be dragged down by the addition of half-baked fighting mechanics, which ultimately only distract the player from the game's central pleasures.

Great games know what they are, and don't try to do more. To illustrate my point, a thought exercise: what would Canabalt be like if it let you stop and shoot the deathbots? (Hint: the answer is not "totally sweet".)

I'd like to suggest that game developers think hard about the purpose of violence in their games, and don't just include it in the design out of habit. If it's going to be an important part of the core experience, great; if not, you may find you can save the cost and make a better game by simply leaving out the violence.

A few recent examples of games that could be improved by toning down the violence:

Crackdown 2

The original Crackdown is a great game. Jumping about, collecting orbs, lifting ever-heavier objects and tossing them around, blowing things up in ever-greater explosions; these are blissful in a way few other games have matched. The assassination missions are really just a cheap cement that holds the experience together and gives you a way to level up your character's skills. The missions never shine, because they have to be completed primarily by methodically shooting a lot of dudes in the face; however, as there's only one gang leader you have to kill in each mission, it's possible to apply your athletic, driving and explosives skills to find shortcuts into their inner sanctum – by climbing up a cliff face from the ocean, say, or ramming through a back door in your supercar – which gave the missions a pleasing puzzle-strategy element.

Crackdown 2, to its credit, doesn't spoil most of what is good about Crackdown, and it makes several improvements that have been unjustly ignored by those quick to call it a microwave reheat of the original. However, it botches the core mission structure by making it all about shooting. Although there are a wider variety of mission types, they all require you to kill a large number of marked enemies in a confined location, without leaving the immediate area. This completely removes your ability to approach these missions in the style you find most fun, and forces you to grind through each one as a common or garden man-shooter. The game passively prevents you from taking advantage of the best part of the game – jumping and climbing – for the duration of the missions.

This limitation was reflected in many of the game's reviews. Christian Donlan's review at Eurogamer was essentially a plea to stick with it through the combat missions, it will get better:

Only with the campaign behind you will you start to get a true sense of just how good this game can be… it's the game waiting for you after the end credits that provides the most fun.

For "campaign", read "structured combat".

Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge is a fantastically promising game, but it's not without flaws. It is, in fact, probably more flaw than game, even though it comes close to greatness. The basic design of continuous free-running through a starkly colour-coded obstacle course is inspired, and although the level design and finicky controls often fail to allow the player to maintain a smooth flow, the one element of the game that never supports the player's experience is the combat. Being chased by gun-wielding cops is a great motivator; having to stop and kickbox or shoot said cops is a frustrating, joyless, disorienting waste of your time. Perhaps if it was easier to take out a police officer mid-run, without breaking stride, it would all click into place and the flow of parkour would be enhanced, but as it is it only detracts from the game.

A sequel has been announced. [Note from Kotaku: We've heard it's been considered; not announced.] If DICE can fix up the parkour mechanics a bit and strip out direct combat entirely, Mirror's Edge 2 will be something to look forward to.

Grand Theft Auto IV

As in Crackdown, combat in the GTA series is solid enough for general hell-raising, but becomes tiresome in the way it's used for story missions. Random brawls with police, civilians and criminal gangs are thrilling, and require no more complexity from the gun combat than the game already has: depth in these situations is provided by the interaction of many gameplay systems at once, unbound and unpredictable. However, each of the scripted missions usually turns into a pitched, stationary shoot-out over the top of a car or some crates, which quickly drives home how shallow the gun mechanics and the enemy combat AI really are. These missions narrow the focus down to just the combat elements of GTA, which is like playing Concentration with only two cards. By itself, it doesn't have the depth to stay fun for as long as the game needs it to.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix / Half-Blood Prince

You may be surprised to learn that the two most recent Harry Potter movie tie-ins are perfectly decent games. They're not bad; I'd rate them above, say, the LEGO games in terms of variety and appeal, if not general polish. The games provide exactly what most buyers of a Harry Potter movie game would want: they give you the sense of hanging out at Hogwarts, accompanied by all the familiar characters, and let you play through the stories in a fairly engaging fashion.

There's exactly one thing the games do even better than the books or films: allow you to explore Hogwarts for yourself. The rooms and courtyards are all immediately recognisable from the films, and in playing through the game you learn how each place is positioned and connected to the others by the confounding rabbit warren mess of tunnels, hallways and moving staircases (the in-game architecture was drawn up from the same plans and models used in the films, so you could follow the paths the characters took from scene to scene… y'know, if you were into that kind of thing). You may scoff, but these games are the closest thing I've played to Warren Spector's famous "one city block" RPG concept.

Of course, because these are mainstream videogames, it was not enough for them to be simple adventures through a familiar world; they had to include the mandatory gunfights "wizard duels". The magic battle scenes are already the weakest parts of both the books and the films, which survive primarily on their strong characters; there's even less to recommend these scenes in the games. The Order of the Phoenix contains, I kid you not, a mopping minigame that manages to be more fun than the wizard duels.

(The next Harry Potter game is reportedly shaping up to be a Gears-of-War-esque cover-based sparkly-shooter. This is… interesting.)

Fallout 3

This one could be controversial. I'm convinced that Fallout 3 would be a better game if it just dialled the combat down a bit. The frequency of combat isn't really the root of the problem; it's that, to me, the time-stopping VATS system never feels like an engaging enough gameplay mechanic that I look forward to using it. It has a subtler and deeper problem than the rest of the games in this list: the combat is competently designed, but feels oddly meaningless in a game otherwise packed full of meaning.

The only battles that productively absorb my attention are those fought directly in service of a larger and more interesting goal, or against an enemy who has a name and a personality. The generic radscorpions, raiders and super mutants that attack the player on sight cease to be interesting opponents after the first couple of encounters; if I knew a bit more about the individuals I was fighting, the combat might not feel so aimless. ("If only you could talk to the monsters!")

Steve Gaynor wrote about the aimlessness of videogame violence in a recent blog post, which perfectly captures my problem with Fallout 3:

Violence in film, literature or on stage can either be meaningful or meaningless. When it is meaningful, it resonates with the audience; when it is meaningless, it is largely (and rightly) derided. Consider the death o Shakespeare's Hamlet following a duel, or of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, or of Evelyn Mulwray at the end of Chinatown, versus, say, the nameless mooks mown down in Rambo II or Commando or Hard Boiled. The killing by the protagonist of those without identity devalues human life in the work, and thereby robs the violence of meaning (it being perpetrated upon human forms with no value.)

And so a metric for games comes to mind: violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual.

(Emphasis in original.)

I'm not sure exactly what Gaynor means by "legitimate", but if he had said "meaningful" I would agree wholeheartedly. That's not to say all games must have well-developed enemy characters to be worthwhile; I'd be happy if the violence in Fallout 3 (or any of the other games in this list) was simply more interesting on a tactical level.

For another recent take on this issue, see Michael Thomsen's article The Case for More Violent Games, at IGN. He makes a similar point to Steve Gaynor: that violence in games is not necessarily bad, but should be more meaningful. Both are great articles, and I agree with both. Right now, I'd just like to present the implied alternative:

If you aren't going to make your game's violence well-designed or meaningful, consider not doing it at all.

Republished with permission.

Fraser Allison is currently writing a thesis at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on how video game mechanics create meaning for players. He writes about this, and many other game issues, at redkingsdream.com.

Jun 2, 2010

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

BioShock™

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic Much like telling an erotic story within a Victorian backdrop seems ever so sexy, human depravity juxtaposed against a seemingly golden age of good, moral values is darkly comic and that much more disturbing.

In the future, the ‘60s never happened. Or at least, that's what we are led to believe in the alternate history of Bethesda's Fallout 3. While set in a post-apocalyptic America in the 23rd century following the events of a devastating war in the 21st century, curiously most of the post-war artifacts of Fallout 3 look and sound an awful lot like the artifacts of a post-World War II America, as if American culture somehow became frozen in time around 1959 and maintained a seemingly cheery and idyllic image of the ‘40s and ‘50s up until that great disaster.

Of course, this notion of creating a static image of post-World War II America is not exclusive to the Fallout universe. The underwater city of Rapture in 2K's Bioshock literally finds its progress halted on New Year's Eve 1959, and the similar images of a ruined society juxtaposed against the relics of a culture of the ‘40s and ‘50s also make up the bulk of 2K's game.
Both games seem to revel in this juxtaposition of an idealized American age with the ruin of society. The soundtracks of both games jarringly counterpoint the brutal actions of scavengers in the Capital Wasteland and Rapture. Inhumanity and desperation is hauntingly accompanied by songs by songs by Billie Holiday, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters. That both soundtracks are comprised of songs, which almost exclusively belong to a time associated with values, decency, and decorum, is, of course, intended to be ironic and also serves as a means of emphasizing just how rotten the world has become since a time so idealized in the American imagination.

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

The effectiveness of this kind of contrast really can't be overstated. Much like telling an erotic story within a Victorian backdrop seems ever so sexy (it is so much more fun unbuttoning something that seems to be so very buttoned up), human depravity juxtaposed against a seemingly golden age of good, moral values is darkly comic and that much more disturbing. For instance, Bioshock‘s art deco architecture and retro advertisements serve to heighten the horror of what Rapture and its citizens have become. A scene in the game in which the protagonist comes across a woman who seems sharply dressed in 50s fashion cooing over a "baby" in a perambulator is one of these moments of horror. The image of motherly concern straight out of an issue of the Saturday Evening Post is disrupted by the knowledge that something isn't right in the world of Rapture, where art deco columns crumble and the paint is peeling off the image of an enthusiastic woman selling cigarettes on a nearby poster.

Fallout 3‘s opening sequence, which begins with the flickering of cathodes on a retro seeming radio and the strains of the Ink Spots's "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire", demonstrates this commitment to suggesting the "wrongness" of the world in contrast to that which we assume must be "right". The camera pans back and reveals the interior of a bus, in which the radio and a schmaltzy bobbling, plastic hula girl are mounted. It continues to pan back to reveal that the bus lays on a heap of torn metal and glass. A crumbling Washington monument is revealed and then a gas-masked and heavily armed warrior in black emerges in the scene to complete the image of the decimation of an American mythology. This image depends on its audience's sense of the initial images representing a kinder, gentler America and doesn't simply replace that image with one of a grimmer vision of American decay. Instead, it allows the images to coexist with one another, perhaps, suggesting a commonality or a causal link that exists between these two images, ideal and decaying at once.

Which returns me to my initial observation, that it might seem that in the universe of Fallout that the 1960s never existed. One can't help but wonder though, given the lingering images of post-World War II America in the Capital Wasteland if this isn't the image of the transition between 1959 and the future. This 23rd century America with its rotting Washington D.C., full of scavengers and mutants, may be the equivalent of the ‘60s, a cartoon image drawn just as large as the cartoonish Vault Boy that represents the stasis of ‘40s and ‘50s values throughout the series.

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

Likewise, that Rapture is fallen as of 1959 in Bioshock‘s alternate history is seemingly appropriate. In 1959, the first wave of Baby Boomers were 13 years old, the next decade was to be theirs, the dominant years of their coming of age. The sweetness of "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" would give way to the melancholy and ferociousness of Joplin, Hendrix, and the Doors. Suits and ties, pencil skirts and embroidered sweaters would give way to jeans and sandals, tie dye and love beads, long hair and dirty feet. Moral certainty would give way to Vietnam and Watergate.

Truthfully, neither game fully idealizes post-World War II America fully. The plasmid advertisements of Bioshock reveal a sinister animosity between men and women of this "more moral" age as they frequently feature cartoony images of buttoned down husbands using plasmids as a way of combating their rolling pin wielding wives. Fallout 3 includes some songs on its soundtrack, which reveal a less than ideally modest vision of sexuality from that era. The thinly veiled sexuality of the lyrics of "Butcher Pete (Part 1)" (a real "lady killer" in more ways than one) or the inclusion of "Let's Go Sunning" (a song from the soundtrack of a nudist film from 1954) reveal that this age was a less prudish and genteel one than it is often imagined. However, while a dark sense of humor underlies these comic revelations of a less than innocent culture, Fallout 3 and Bioshock‘s post-1950s worlds are anything but funny. Brutal and violent, the citizens of the Capital Wasteland and Rapture are selfish, cruel, and frequently driven by unchecked desire and drug addiction.

In these futures, the world transitions into a future that looks more like the present. In that sense, Fallout 3 and Bioshock may be less forward looking than they are about critiquing the now.

Republished with permission from Pop Matters.

G. Christopher Williams is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point and the Multimedia Editor at PopMatters.

PopMatters is an international magazine of cultural criticism that reviews music, film, television, DVD, books, comic books/graphic fiction, and video games. Additional coverage of gaming culture can be found in their Multimedia section.

May 26, 2010

Video Games, I've Let You Down

Fallout 3

It's hard to explain your favorite games to people who don't play them, isn't it? Well, if you think that's tough, wait ‘til you hear about the time I played Fallout 3 with my parents.

Around the time the game launched, they came down to visit me in Brooklyn from Massachusetts. As my dad had a lot of interest in games and tech back in the day – in fact, he's a former journalist and I followed in his footsteps in many ways – I figured I'd give my parents a tour of what was new and hot in our world.

I chose Fallout 3 because I thought it was an example of how evolved games had become. It's a nuanced, story-driven world, a fascinating post-apocalyptic take on our familiar country, has plenty of character development and all that.

Unlike a lot of people, my parents do actually play video games – kind of. My father bought a wheel controller for his PC and plays hi-spec racing sims; my mother is the kind to which companies like PopCap owe their existence. Sometimes she plays so much Snood she forgets to eat. I figured they had just enough lexicon to understand why Fallout 3 was special, so I gave them a quick summary of what it was all about and put it on.

"What is this?" Mom said. "Where are you supposed to be?" (I'm in my 101 jumpsuit, not far from the Vault.)

"It's post-apocalyptic Washington," I told her. "It's really cool."

She scrunched her nose a little. "It doesn't look like Washington," she said. "It just looks like… I don't know what." She was unimpressed, and I was frustrated she was unimpressed. I was even more frustrated because, when I looked around at the wasteland, it didn't really look like Washington to me, either. I told her it's really just the beginning of the game and she'd get it in a minute, but inwardly I knew it'd be much more than "a minute" from that point until I'd reach a spot with recognizable landmarks. And when she asked me who I'm supposed to be, I don't really have a good answer besides "a guy."

"So this is a first-person shooter, huh?" Said Dad.

"No," I insisted. "It's pretty much an RPG, where –"

"Well then, what's that?" Dad demanded, pointing in the corner of the first-person view at the barrel of my gun. He was just trying to be difficult -– he was enjoying my consternation -– but he kind of had a point.

I started trying to explain about the RPG elements, about environmental storytelling and character progression and people stuck in vaults, and suddenly it all sounded kind of silly coming out of my mouth. To my parents, Fallout 3 is a game about some guy with a gun trundling through a wasteland, and that's really it.

And it's not just a generation gap issue: Try it with any non-gamer. Can you explain, say, BioShock in just a few sentences to someone in a way that actually conveys why it was interesting or important? "It's a game about the failure of Randian Objectivism" not only fails, but it sounds pretentious. "You're an amnesiac splicing yourself with gene tonics in an underwater city gone mad" conveys the gist, but misses the poignancy (or not, your pick) of the Little Sister choice, the flexibility of the mechanics, or essentially anything that makes it good.

Video Games, I've Let You Down

A Castlevania Conundrum

Even a simpler game is hard to articulate. I play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night whenever my roommate and I are hanging out listening to records, because it's engaging to me yet simple enough I can zone out to music or talk with him. Lately, after noticing me playing it enough times, my roommate (who is respectful of video games but not especially personally interested in them) asked me about it. When I told him it was pretty much my favorite all-time game, and when I told him it was widely considered one of history's better titles, he asked why.

I started to explain the "Metroidvania" aesthetic, the uniqueness of SotN's gothic vibe, the luminous little details in the game's environment, the whole upside-down castle thing – and he started to tease me, riffing on my explanation in his best "nerd voice." It was actually pretty funny. And his extrapolation was startlingly apt for someone I assumed wasn't going to appreciate what I was trying to tell him. But basically, he was right: I couldn't talk about it without using jargon, without sounding like a weirdo.

When you think about it, gamers aren't even all that good about talking about games with one another. That's why we have to use vague and ultimately meaningless words like "gameplay" (yes… "play" is what one does with a "game," and…), and why we're still bound to describing games by their genre years and years after the medium has diversified enough to make those descriptors inadequate and overly simplistic.

Theoretically, it's the job of game critics to shape the language around the medium and communicate on it effectively, but even we writers could be doing lots better. Our own Stephen Totilo once devoted an entire GDC presentation to words commonly used in game criticism that don't mean anything. I'm no innocent either. I've already used "aesthetic" "vibe" and "thing" in this feature, words that don't really specify what I'm trying to talk about, and I'm hoping he doesn't edit them out, so that I can illustrate my point.

You're probably wondering why it matters how we talk about games. No matter what words we use, we "get it" when we talk among ourselves, so isn't that all that counts? Well, look at it this way: if we're the only ones who get it, we'll never be able to share it. Other, more established media may have times when they're hard to explain, when they are "about" many things at once. Can a Lost fan easily explain what that show was all about, or why it's good, to someone who's never watched it? Probably not. But in general, art, media and cultural phenomena become relevant when they're easy to share, and most kinds of video games aren't yet.

Plus, when we can't explain ourselves, it makes it easier for us to be misunderstood – yes, Mass Effect has adult scenes and aims to be "mature", but it's hardly the risqué sex sim scandal made it out to be. Grand Theft Auto is a crime simulator in its way, but that's not all it is.

"Getting" Grand Theft Auto

Speaking of GTA, that's actually one of the games I've found is most easily comprehensible to my friends. They get it, both because of the cultural juggernaut that's always surrounded it and because it's so easy to grasp what it's about – raising hell with total freedom in the real world is a near-universal fantasy.

I may not understand why my non-gamer friends play the way they do. One friend likes to play Ballad of Gay Tony so she can get Luis drunk in the club and make him fall down the stairs repeatedly (okay, doing that is pretty funny. She also inexplicably never tires of pushing ladies in the restroom.

She's really digging Red Dead Redemption, too. After she and my other friend shot my horse, murdered a bunch of innocent people and ultimately docked 500 points from my hard-won Honor, I asked her if she liked the game. "Yeah!" She enthused. "It's like GTA>, except with horses."

That sums it up. So why is it so much easier to "get" a game like GTA or by extension, Red Dead Redemption, than other titles, even those with far fewer elements going on? It's because GTA is universal: everyone's wished they could just act out against their environment without real-world consequences, just for fun, from time to time. Not all games are built on such accessible ideas – nor should they be. We could explain to our friends why we relate to them anyway, if only we had the right words.

When it comes to the more complex ideas and experiences unique to games, we as gamers and as an industry haven't yet gotten our lexicon to a point where it's sophisticated enough to convey them. Hey, it's not like we've had any practice; we've only in the past talked about what makes games special with each other, with people from "our world." That we're starting to notice our vocabulary is failing us is a good sign – it means that "other people" are ready to listen.

[ Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]