Jump off a ledge. Glide halfway across the room to fight some bad guys. Run through fire.
Sounds pretty dangerous, eh? Sounds like it has nothing to do with video games either, right?
Or does it?
Have you played RockSteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum? Or more so, any of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games?
What is the feeling you get as you, the player, are asked to do what most of us in the real world would deem impossibly dangerous?
So this past week I had a very sobering conversation on path of my career with a fantastic instructor of mine who has a ton of industry experience, Net-net, I need to decide whether I’ll be a coder or an artist. Not because I was good at one or the other, but simply the fact of time to learn the plethora of tools, technologies and game engines out there just doesn’t exist. He also illuminated that the program I’m in isn’t geared toward creating game developers, but rather environment artists and game asset creators. Yikes! I wanted to learn everything so I could be in super demand after I graduated but now it seems I have to focus more on the modeling front. I don’t have a huge problem with this.
Here’s the kicker though – I’m in the one year certificate program and he let me know that’s just not enough time to create a kick-ass demo reel. THIS I have a problem with. Now I need to re-evaluate not only my focus, but my graduation date and hence, the date I get a job. Not cool given I have a family.
I think I barely scratched the surface in my convo with my instructor and need to dive more deeply into it, working out every little painstaking detail. Yeah, this is where sweating the small stuff really counts. You can throw you’re own cliche’ in here too.
I’m also having a great discussion on what is a game designer versus a game developer and who’s the one that gets final say on what gets put into a game. Check it out here.
Take the poll below and make a stand – game dev or game designer?
No this title doesn’t mean I’ve forged some kind of ancient treaty at a certain trade show for fans of video games. Speaking of which, I went to the awesomest video game enthusiast show on the planet – Penny Arcade Expo, better known as PAX.
Let me be the first to say that the vibe was amazing – you could feel the electricity everywhere that we were all gamers and were there to support each other. People came dressed their favorite characters, ranging from Jedi of Star Wars: Jedi Knights Of The Old Republic to Camy from Street Fighter to the baddies from Resistance 2: Fall Of Man. There also had to be people from various guilds of games (maybe WoW?) because I couldn’t tell what in the world people dressed as private eyes with cardboard masks were supposed to be from! It was the perfect mash-up of a Star Trek convention faithfuls combined with E3-like gaming euphoria. The results speak for themselves: over 75,000 attendees. I’ve never heard of any other show having that many people come to an event, save when President Barack Obama was on the campaign trail and 80,000 people attended a rally in Oregon.
I admit, I was there to primarily to network with other game developers rather than to play games, but hell, how could I NOT play games? 
The PAX people planned this one so well – they gave each attendee two buttons that attendees could challenge you to any game for. And I mean any game. Case in point, I played good ‘ol thumb-wrestling and it was a damn good match too. I lost though. Ah, well.
Then, on my way from the free play console area, I got challenged again. The Magic: The Gathering tournament area was strategically placed close by so we thought about playing a round, but I forgot my prized 2nd edition deck at home. OK, I didn’t forget it. I wouldn’t take it out of the house because of the value it could fetch. But I digress.
So, what game did we play? Street Fighter IV! To my pleasure, the play control is exactly the same as the original Street Fighter II so I felt right at home. However, SF4 has a number of new chain combos reminiscent of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. And boy, did I get pwned. I tried and tried to win with my fav, Ryu, but to no avail vs. Viper. Finally I choose Guile and won on sheer physical moves. No sonic booms or sonic kicks or anything like that. But by this time, it was already the 8th round.
Jeremy, if you’re out there reading this, thanks for being such a good sport. I can’t wait to see what kind of wacky reverse-grav physics engines you develop for games. Who knows, I might use it some day!
I could go on about everything I loved at PAX, but I’ll focus on the independent developers I met and the indie dev panel I attended. It was amazing to see such a cadre of folks who, while they were indie developers, produced some extremely high quality titles. There were so many, but I’ll focus on the ones I actually played because I believe you really can’t judge a game until you play it – well, mostly. 
The people at Gambit Game Labs from Singapore really opened my eyes to what’s possible with XNA, with their game CarneyVale: Showtime. A new and innovative twist on the action side-scroller, this game takes advantage of the Farseer Physics Engine to enable players to flip around vertically from one point to the next. Not only that, but you also get to enter a vehicle and, without the game changing perspective one iota, it suddenly becomes a top down shoot ‘em up! Jean from Gambit was nice enough to take me through the game and really give me the back story to how the levels were developed. I never thought such a robust, stunning game could be developed on XNA and Gene helped inform my decision about the choice of platform the for the game I have in the works.
StudioWallJump’s Light was the second indie game I played. It’s puzzle game for the Nintendo Wii where you have to shine three colored lights onto the targets on the board, but the trick is not to have the incorrect colors crossing. Remember Ghostbusters! ad Egan Spangler’s famous line “Don’t cross the streams!” Yep, the same rule applies here. Playing the Wii is fun enough, but then when you add on smartly-designed puzzles and rockin’ techno beats for background music as you hit each target, how could you go wrong? Nicholas Trahan, owner, artist and designer for StudioWallJump, showed me the ropes and was also kind enough to offer himself up as a resource when it comes to navigating the complex field of indie game development.
The third game I played was a children’s book type called What Is Bothering Carl? made by Andy Hull at StoryFort studios. The book follows a little boy Cyclops named Carl who, as goes through life, thinks about a lot of things. From a gameplay mechanic perspective, it brings a fresh perspective of the pop-up books we all grew up with by cueing players to click on certain areas that will play action sequences. For example, there’s a part where Carl scares away some goblins, and when you click on the part of the story he roars and they run away. Kudos to Andy for bringing life to the children’s pop-up book. He’s got a book geared toward older kids coming up and I am definitely going to take a look at it. If you have kids, What Is Bothering Carl? is a must have, and they’ll surely love it. My 10, 7 and 3-year-olds do.
Shank, a fast-paced fighting side-scroller was the last indie-game I played and it rocks! Made by the folks at Klei Entertainment, this game is a unique take that pays homage to the Samurai Jack-style cartoons, you play Shank, who’s seemingly on a mission to take out some really big, bad dudes. Shank uses everything at his disposal to accomplish his mission like bombs, machine guns, and you guessed, it knives. But the secret sauce lies in the chain combos you can do that unlock certain moves. My fav was the double-angle shot where Shank takes out two pistols and shoots in booth directions, very Matrix-like. It also makes use of cut-scenes that jive well with the game-play action. For example, at the end of one-level Shank is seen to be tossing a bomb into his enemy’s mouth, who’s head subsequently explodes. Since the cinematics are cartoons, they totally reminded me of Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace from back in the day of those epic Laser Disc-based arcade games. 1983, to be exact.
Yes, it could be the question. But not for this blog. About a week ago I said I would talk about the work of Ian Bogost and Jane McGonigal, and why the concepts they’ve laid out are critically important to the design of persuasive games, and in my estimation, to game design as a whole.
But I’ve decided to take a different tact this week on yet another important issue in persuasive game design, one that always gets us game designers right here in the gut: the issue of storytelling in games. Should we or shouldn’t we? Does it matter? Who cares?
Well for one, I do. And you should too, if you’re into games at all. In fact, Gamasutra’s run a great interview with Rhianna Pratchett, lead writer for Mirror’s Edge and Heavenly Sword. First, I disagree with Rhianna on the issue of “sameness” in character development. Yes, they have their differences, but if any indication of human history and how we tell our stories is correct, then it’s far more similar and less so than we think. I’m sure everyone here has read Vogler’s “The Writer’s Journey” as well as “Mask Of A Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell and how there are archetypes that, while, they have different names and costumes, are nearly identical. Take a look at the stories in various cultures around the world and you’ll see what I’m talking about. For example, take tales of the Black Dog. Cultures from Northern Europe to Latin America all have some form of a black dog legend. Coincidence? Nope. There’s also Jewish Kaballisic tale called The Chains of The Messiah, regarding Asmodeus, ruler of evil and demons and his Queen wife, Lillith, who were able to transform into black dogs found to be living on Mt. Seir. Once defeated, the chains holding back the arrival of the Messiah would break and enable his arrival into this world.
Well, I’m Jewish and I’m thrilled that I can be green on St.Patrick’s Day with my fellow Irish bretheren. Likewise, I’ll wish them a good Mazel Tov and hope they do lots of mitzvot!
I do agree with Rhianna regarding using cut-scenes (or as they were called in the days of the NES, “cinema scenes”). One genre that does this wonderfully is the graphic-novel style game. Cut-scenes are built into how the story gets told. Without them, it’s just NOT a graphic novel. Let’s take Max Payne as our role model, which I believe to be the gold standard (kudos Remedy!). The story progresses in chapters (don’t they all?) and they way it gets from one to the next is through cut-scenes with comic book-style panes, and the word bubbles are read by the voice actor, Sam Spade style. Even along the way DURING gameplay, we hear Max reciting the thoughts in his head that propel the story forward.
Take a look at some gameplay here to see what I mean:
All in all, I think graphic novels get a bad rap as “not real literature,” but to those who would make such a claim I say look at the Watchmen’s Hugo Award.
Greetings fellow liberators of the pale and dull FPS!
So you might be wondering what this title has to do with video games, besides the fact that there is already a Watchmen game published as a download. So perhaps a better title would be, what makes a good watch? A seemingly unrelated question to what we were talking about last week, yes. Is it still appropriate? Yes! And here’s why.
Cue 1960′s Batman TV Series spinning bat wheel. In our last discussion, we talked about some of the issues affecting the development of persuasive games, ranging from lack of a detailed revenue model to the need for a “coolness” factor that can make Master Chief look like a Master Chef. I ended by discussing Ian Bogost’s concepts of what persuasive games can do and how he believes video games can be a powerful tool for procedural rhetoric.
What does Ian mean by procedural rhetoric? Let’s start with defining procedural. Essentially, this means the nuts and bolts, the zeros and ones, the software code itself that enables a computer to be able to carry out a function, executable or otherwise. That’s a pretty basic definition and I’m sure I’m being simplistic, but for the purposes of our conversation it will work.
Now let’s talk about rhetoric. Back in the days of the ancient Greeks, rhetoric was considered an essential skill to have, in fact, life-saving at trials. These weren’t 12-member juries in a courtroom. It was hundreds of members of the community asking you tough questions about why you think you’re right or committed a crime. And it was conducted in full view of the public. Today, we have a very negative view of rhetoric, often associated with key messages ads attempt to communicate or some new thing someone is selling in an infomercial. However, it would be more historically accurate to equate such aspects with sophism. In fact, citizens on the other side of a court case would hire a sophist to make disparaging accusations of their opponent at the trial. You could think of these people as the surprise guest in a Jerry Springer show that no one expects, but everyone loves to see because they make the show more interesting. From a literal perspective, we find the expression “vile sophistry” in verse four of the song “The Minutemen” written during the Civil War in 1861 by J.B Hawkins:
Where your pastures are radiant with Heav’n’s best light
Monopoly moves through the land of the free,
Like a spectre that stalks in the stillness of night,
Its victims alluring with vile sophistry.
One can imagine that this was one of the many places where the term “vile sophistry” got its origins.
So now that we know procedural rhetoric is, it’s time we get back to the main crux: what makes a good watch? For me, a good watch is one that yes, looks snazzy, but also allows me to pair it with any set of my clothes. I can use the watch to compliment various aspects and incorporate it as I wish. It gives me control. It’s this control aspect that I think is criticallyimportant to creating a really good persuasive game.
Bogost provides a fantastic example in the introductory chapter of his book, Persuasive Games. He talks about a PBS Kids game called Freaky Flakes, designed to teach kids the messaging tricks that cereal companies use in their advertising to get kids to buy it. Essentially, kids get to enter some text and out comes a cereal box with a prototypical marketing message. It was a really great idea, but no matter what text you entered, you got the same basic outcome. Bogost had this to say in his blog:
Finally, wouldn’t it have been great if there were also a simulation that you could run on the boxes you create with this tool? Add some natural language processing and a few simple rulesets — it might make the lessons about advertising more effective.
In other words, wouldn’t it have been great for the kids to come up with their own cereal box? What would happen if they designed a healthy cereal? What would the box say? This is why I want to know what makes a good watch. I don’t want the run-in-the-mill watch that gives me the same ol’ time every instance I look at it. Maybe it’s a calculator watch that I can program look any way I want it to. Maybe I don’t want it to be a watch, so I change it to be a GPS system. It goes beyond “colors” to actual functions and aspects of the watch I can modify as I wish. I get to change the procedures.
This is precisely how I am to design my persuasive game. Don’t get me wrong, linear storylines are great and have their place. But if we really want to change people’s minds, they have to feel like they can change their environments. Jane McGonigal, director of Game Research and Development at the Institute For The Future, quoted SETI Director and 2009 TED Winner Jill Tarter as saying the following:
“I’m interested in the possibility that learning to be good at a game makes you good at life, makes you good at changing the world, and gives you skills that are going to allow you to reinvent your environment. Because, in the game, you play against an environment that’s been given to you.”
And in life, we are also given an environment that impacts us. But how do we change it? How can we learn from it? And what exactly would such a game look like? All questions I’m hoping to tackle in my next post, and I’ll also discuss what McGonigal was up to in referring to Jill Tarter’s work. You might remember McGonigal from the innovative World Without Oil game she created.
Stay cool! Or rather, hope I stay cool here in Seattle. It’s dang hot!
Howdy folks, this is my first post and I thought I would take a stab at a very, shall we say, incendiary topic: morality in video games. As it just so happens, Gamasutra this week has an excellentarticlewritten by James Portnow on the technical mechanics game designers can use or not use to their liking and why some would work and others won’t/don’t. James goes deeper into the issue, stating that, as designers we should aim for ambiguous morality in game play. What’s ambiguous morality? In short, it’s providing opportunities for players to make judgements that aren’t as clear cut as “save the damsel in distress or get the big gun” but more like “steal food from your friends to feed a starving homeless person.” Basically, morals that implant a powerful question in our mind as to whether or not the actions of the character is right.
James goes on to assert that from a mechanics perspective once you put a metric on morality it takes away from having these questions explored and answered in our own way. For instance, a “good/bad” meter, “darkside/lightside,” and so on. I see James’ point – once you have the metric it makes the action about how do I become a more powerful character or avoid getting caught so that my character doesn’t die.
But I see a solution somewhere in the middle.
Yes, metrics can be a distraction but not so if done in the right way. For example, make the player feel the consequences of their actions way down the road in the story to where they say in their head “ooops, maybe I shouldn’t have killed the corrupt head of my faction to advance given I needed the faction’s support to defeat the other side. Now I’m hated by everyone.”
Sadly, we don’t often see such issues raised in games. Why? James gives a practical reason that I don’t entirely agree with – the fact that it costs extra money in development dollars to create such content without messing with the overall storyline. He asserts that developers don’t know how to re-purpose content to make this inexpensive for the publishing studio. Ok, yes and no. Yes, it does cost extra time and money. No, because quite honestly speaking, there is a demand or rather, expectation, that third-person or first-person shooters will have a simple moral basis as the motivation for the plot and character. Simplistic decision-making sells, at least for the moment.
So now we’re left with even a bigger chicken-and-the-egg issue. Do players expect this simplicity because we as game designers have conditioned players to expect it or are we truly meeting a demand and milking it for all it’s worth? If the former is true do we then not have an obligation to create scenerios for ambigous morality as the basis for the game and uncondition the players? And if it’s the latter, don’t we still owe it to ourselves to get people thinking about bigger social issues like genocide, starvation and the resurgence of extremists here in the States and in Europe?
It’s not about asking whether we should kill the “enemy” in the game. It’s about how do we design games that don’t involve the use of violence that are still fun to play at the end of the day. Quite frankly, if we look at Skinner’s classical conditioning concepts, sooner or later these hardcore players are going to have FPS overload and look elsewhere for the next “thing.” That’s a wake-up call and an opportunity for game designers.
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