Everyday is a Shooter

Thanks to Leigh Alexander at Sexy Videogameland for mentioning my blog yesterday and to Mitch Krpata again for getting the word out in the first place. I never imagined anything I ever wrote would make its way past the 3-4 close friends and family members I assumed would be this blog's sole audience, and to get notice from people who are legit top-shelf game writers means a lot. Thanks!

I caved in and bought a 60 gig playstation 3 last fall, even though I had reason to believe that there was not much worth playing yet. There wasn't much from the Sony camp to tear me away from the 360 this Winter. (This is even before my unexpected and crippling addiction to Halo 3's multiplayer, which seized me by my hidden passion for lasering and swept me into its jagged maw. I was lasering people in my dreams for weeks.) So the PS3 mostly sat there looking pretty and doing yeoman service as a part-time Okami upscaler and Planet Earf bluray player. But while I was waiting for Metal Gear Solid 4 to come out, I discovered what is still the best ps3 game I've ever played, Everyday Shooter.

Everyday Shooter was created by Jonathan Mak, who apparently made this entire game-- visuals, gameplay, and music-- single-handedly. Everything I know about game design (which is admittedly very little) tells me that this is a staggering accomplishment; almost all contemporary console games are the product of large teams, and the ps3 is reputedly an onerous platform to develop for. While the basic game mechanics are simple (a twin-stick shooter in the style of Geometry Wars), Mak took these well-worn mechanics and elevated them to art.

The first piece of this vision is the game's synthesis of music, visuals, and gameplay. Inspired by Tetsuya Miziguchi's Rez (which was itself inspired by and dedicated to Wassily Kandinsky), Mak designed the game so that the player's movements and shooting help to create the game's music and visuals simultaneously. Dying enemies spray geometrical gouts of color and produce runs of twangy guitar notes. The musical idea extends to the level design-- each level plays like track in an album, and has a distinctive visual style and musical palette. You can even play the levels on shuffle. The music itself, which is all just Jonathan Mak playing an electric guitar, is amazing; it's the kind of stuff Brian Eno would be doing now if he grew up playing Castlevania.

The second piece of the vision is the variety of the gameplay that Mak manages to sqeezee within the confines of a standard twin-stick shoot 'em up. Each level of the game has a new set of enemy types and behaviors, and also a different “chaining system.” In each level there's a way to “chain” enemy kills-- in some cases it's shooting bombs that float across the field in a particular way, in others it's killing certain enemies in a certain order-- and doing so both makes it easier to manage the hordes of attackers and produces more glowing unlock points. This mechanic gave each level a sort of puzzle-y feeling, as I probed the game to find the trick that allowed me to get through. Because the chaining mechanics took some of the pressure off my substandard reaction skills, I found that the game kept producing these calm-in-the-storm moments: even as the enemies bore down on me from all sides I was concentrating on finding the next link in the chain that would clear the screen. The effect is oddly soothing.

These elements come together so perfectly sometimes that it manages some moments of capital-B Beauty, a rare product in the videogame marketplace. There are moments of beauty to be had here that come from picking up a controller and engaging with the game's rules, and at times I think Mak means say with this game too, and it is this: Everyday is a shooter. Beneath the hostile welter of sound and vision there is a hidden, beauty-making logic to be discovered.

Playing it Wrong

First off: the good ship Versusclucluland's article on note tracking got a shout-out in two blogs yesterday. Mitch Krpata mentioned my article in Insult Swordfighting, and then Tycho from Penny Arcade gave us a shout-out. Personal games-writing hero Tycho Erasmus Brahe praised something that I wrote: I have chills.

In an excellent recent blog post, 1up.com editor Shawn Elliot drew attention to a phenomenon he calls “playing the game wrong,” the idea of experiencing a game in a way other than it is meant to be experienced. He points out a couple instances of this idea, with the chief aim of drawing attention to the gap between the inevitably idiosyncratic and subjective nature of a player's experience of a game and the “objectivity” demanded by gamers from reviewers. I agree with this general point about this disparity, but I also think that this idea “playing the game wrong” illustrates an interesting aspect of video games themselves.

His story reminded me of my sniper battle with “The End” in Metal Gear Solid 3. I had heard this encounter hyped repeatedly as one of the most creative moments in the entire series. However,when I first entered the wooded area where the battle takes place, I was totally clueless about how I supposed to combat The End. I wandered aimlessly around the woods, getting sniped over and over; but eventually I accidentally stumbled upon him on a ridge overlooking the woods. I found that by moving back and forth between the areas on the ridge I could manage to surprise him again and unload a couple of shots into him with my pistol before he fled; I whittled his health down some this way before he managed to tranquilize me.

After I awoke and escaped captivity, I returned to the area where the battle takes place and for the first time I noticed that there was a gods-damn sniper rifle in a small concrete building at the entry to the woods. At this point the game suddenly clicked: I spent the rest of the battle hiding out in the ridge waiting for my enemy to reveal his position. I bided my time in this way, lying prone in the grass until the reflection of the sun shining off The End's scope gave him away and I shot him down. In these moments I realized that this was the experience the game designer wanted me to have.

When we manage to overcome the obstacles the game throws at us through dumb luck, I think feel that we have missed something important. I could have succeeded in defeating The End without ever getting the sniper rifle, but that very success would be a sort of failure. This experience shows something interesting about the nature of games. When we “play the game right,” the pleasure we get partially consists in the feeling we get when we sense that we have grasped the designer's intention. We feel that the game's designers have successfully communicated something to you through the game, and it is fun.

I don't mean to say that this sense of the “right” way the game should be experienced should govern how reviewers talk about games. If the game wants the player to have a very specific experience, as the MGS series does, your failure to have that experience is the sign of bad game design. I hypothesize that it comes down to play testing, since Valve is as good at this-- nudging the player, coyly, towards the particular enjoyments it means for you to choose-- as Kojima Productions is bad. I hope Kojima's team improve on this aspect as they work on their next project, because when they succeed in getting the experience it intends to you it makes for some utterly unique and inspired gameplay.

Easy Choices

One of the best things about Grand Theft Auto IV is that it improved some fundamental elements in its design by poaching design ideas from other games. Like Metal Gear Solid 4, it implemented Resident Evil 4's over-the-shoulder camera viewpoint and a Gears-of-War style cover mechanic, to good effect. The combat, long a deficiency of the series, is greatly improved. These are elegant solutions to managing shooting in the third-person perspective, and I believe they will come to be so widely adopted in future that they will just become how things are done.

It also adopts another design concept that is becoming fashionable recently, the integration of moral choices into the narrative. At certain junctures in the game's missions, the game explicitly prompts you (via on-screen text) to make a choice between killing and sparing the life of certain characters. I am not certain of the full repercussions of these choices, as I have yet to finish the game, but it does seem that these choices have some effect on the overall narrative. (MTV's Multiplayer blog has in interesting feature where it asked several well-known game designers about one of these choices.)

This has been a common device in role-playing games for some time, but its inclusion in the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Bioshock has renewed interest in the idea of moral choice in video games. There is an important resource in the game that you need in order to improve your character, and the only way to attain it is by taking it from the “Little Sisters,” a group of eerie-looking little girls with glowing eyes who wander the underwater city collecting it from dead bodies. When you manage to defeat the girls' guardians, you are presented with two options: “harvesting” or “saving” them:

Doing the former kills them, but it yields a greater quantity of the character-improving resource. Saving the girls gives less of the resource, but spares their life and seems to free them from whatever causes their eyes glow. The choice also affects the ending of the game; you got the “good” ending by choosing to save all or a most the little sisters. This aspect of the game played like an economics experiment designed to test the limits of the players' willingness to subordinate self-interest to morality. (The game even produced some sensible knaves who calculated how many little sisters you could harvest without incurring the bad ending-- free riders on the moral system. Charts are involved.)

Now one of the things I like about games is that their narratives, unlike those of other forms of art, can reflect the player's choices. However, the recent interest in presenting the player with moral choices has mostly failed at producing works of moral significance. Most “moral choices” in video games, like the choice in Bioshock and the choices in Mass Effect, are binary choices between a clear “good” option and a clear “bad” option. While these choices give the player some chance to craft their own character, these choices don't really challenge any of the player's basic moral intuitions or force them to think about moral questions any differently. We think art should do this, and so if we want games to have the same stature as other forms of art just asking the player whether he wants to be a badass or a goody-goody isn't gong to cut it.

One way is to make some sacrifice an intrinsic part of choosing “good” actions in the game. The choice would have some bite if it required something that would make accomplishing my other goals in the game more difficult. (Clint Hocking wrote an excellent critique of Bioshock, faulting it for failing to present a real conflict between virtue and self-interest. It is really worth reading.) Make the player who wants to be “good” face a gameworld that is more hostile towards his aims and goals.

Another way to make the choice have some actual moral charge would be by introducing a greater degree of moral ambiguity into the choice, either by forcing the player to choose between to apparent goods or forcing him to make the choice without giving him all of the relevant information. This is true to a certain extent in the case of the “little sisters,” because there is some conflicting information given to the player about whether the girls are real human beings, but the game's way of representing your choice makes it clear that there is just something unmistakeably wrong about harvesting children for resources.

Let me give an example of how some progress could be made in making games worthwhile pieces of moral imagination: In an interview with Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, David Jaffee (designer of the God of War series) described a game he once proposed for the PSP called “Heartland.” The game cast the player as an American citizen defending America from invading Chinese soldiers. Jaffee said that he wanted the game to make the player realize the parallels between his character's situation and the plight of Iraqi citizens under American occupation. In the later portions of the game, the player joins a militia and take part in a roundup of Chinese-American citizens meant to evoke the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This would be a game that actually had something of substance to say, not because it discusses a pressing moral issue of our day (the limits of Patriotism) but also becase it would present the character with situations that are morally ambiguous. Jaffee has backed off his desire to tackle these sorts of ideas in his recent work (he's become something of a game-aesthete adopting the Le jeu pour le jeu attitude.), but I wish someone would make games that manage to engage issues in this way in the context of a game that is also enjoyable to play.

I Asked Harmonix about Note Tracking, and Here's What I Learned

When I visited Harmonix's studios earlier this week, one thing that was really impressed on me by the office itself is the fact that its employees are musicians and lovers of music first and foremost. Aside from the music memorabilia strewn everywhere, I also saw a mandolin, several real guitars, and an electric violin. There's a boom box in the bathroom tuned to college radio. In every Harmonix game to date there have been bonus tracks by the staff members' bands. This dedication to musicianship, I found out, also factors in an important aspect of the game's development: note tracking.

Note tracking or track authoring is the process by which recorded music is translated into the rows of glowing gems in the game. I've always been curious about the process, because I've always thought that tracking plays a huge role in how fun a song is to play. It's kind of hard to articulate this quality, but some ways of realizing notes in a game are just more fun to play than others; you notice it when you play the same track in multiple games, like Cherub Rock in Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. I didn't know if the game's designers had some special insight into producing the sense of satisfaction that comes from navigating a tricky set of notes and chords.

I talked with a Harmonix staffer about the process, and I was surprised to learn that the most important factor in the process is musicianship. The people responsible for note tracking, she told me, aim to reproduce the way that the song is played on a real guitar to the greatest extent possible within the confines of the guitar controller's limited repertoire of moves. If, in the real guitar, you would produce a sequence chords by keeping your index finger planted on a higher fret and moving your fingers on the lower frets, the note-trackers will mimic this hand movement on the guitar controller using the fret buttons. The same goes for passages that call for a guitar player to slide his hand up and down the neck of the guitar. She also told me another detail: the various chords on a guitar often have more than one set of fingerings, and a guitar player will usually choose among them based on the chords that surround them in that chord progression. The same line of thinking informs making the tracks in-game when the audio team works up a in-game note chart.

She finally emphasized that the key to making Rock Band fun and making fun note charts is the choice of music. If the song you choose is just a monotonous repetition of a few chords, it won't matter how it appears in the game, it won't be fun to play. (J'accuse, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the '80s, an actual product.) It's not just a matter of choosing songs with needlessly virtuosic solos either. (Here's where I thought Guitar Hero III went off track: it seems to have been designed, at points, with a mind towards offering the player difficulties to surmount. It makes the whole experience more game-ey, to the detriment of the music itself.) The library of songs for Rock Band, which I praised yesterday, reflects a curatorial esteem for musicianship above other factors (even popularity), and I am happy that this viewpoint also makes for the fun of playing the songs in-game.

This also means, by extension, that the real fun to be had out there is playing real guitar. Alors.

Live from the Fetid Cloaca of Allston Mass! It's Just the Tip!

Above is a lovingly crafted original T-Shirt for our in-apartment band, "Just the Tip." You can find more of them at the merch table in the back after the show.

I spent the last two Wednesdays playtesting the drums and guitar for Rock Band 2 at the Harmonix offices in Cambridge. I had a really good time, despite my realization that I labored for four hours in exchange for two cans of Fresca, three slices of pizza, a promotional t-shirt and the sense of deluded self-importance that comes with signing a non-disclosure agreement. It was a solid trade. (At this rate I will be able to construct a crude shelter out of Harmonix promotional t-shirts come the apocalypse.) Because of the aforementioned NDA I can't talk much about my time there, aside from saying that you will be pleased by what they are cooking up. The sequel, from what I saw, provides for virtually every lingering inconvenience in the previous installment and adds new features catering, with near-clairvoyance, to my previously unknown desires.

Aside from the fact that Rock Band is more fun than Guitar Hero by an order of magnitude, it has another advantage over its sister franchise. It is the fact that Rock Band is not a product, but a platform. Rock Band's in-game music store is converging in its presentation and functionality on iTunes, and this is not accidental. When you go out to buy Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (this game exists) you are purchasing a disc full of songs. When you purchase Rock Band you are getting a retinue of charmingly absurd miniature instruments, the song “Wanted Dead or Alive,” and a library card to a growing repository of content. The selection has, and will, satisfy a wide range of plausible viewpoints about constitutes good music. Both the highbrow rock nerd and the Jimmy Buffet aficionado will walk away happy. As Harmonix announced last week, you will take that content with you with you into Rock Band 2 when it comes out this September. The disc that ships with this game will also have much to interest people who like Rock music.

Finally, I learned of fifteen-track song pack from The Who today, coming on July 15th. I know it is crass, at this point, to plead for more while awash in a sea of plenty. But I have a fistful of microsoft points, a moist kiss and a six-pack of Löwenbrau for anyone who can provide me with either of the following:

1) The Slider by T.Rex

2) Boys and Girls in America by The Hold Steady

State of the Art

Mitch Krpata pointed me to an article on GameSetWatch about the state of games criticism. The game writers who Michael Walbridge interviewed for this article, who include writers for mainstream print magazines, the enthusiast press, and bloggers, are collectively responsible for the much of really exciting current writing about games. (Many of their blogs are located on the sidebar) All of them share a dedication to developing a critical language for games that is of the same rank as our critical language for other forms of media, advancing our understanding of a medium whose dynamics are unlike those of other art forms. Krpata justifiably questions whether there is an audience for this kind of thing, and concludes there are grounds for hope on this score.

He points out that the differing needs of the current audiences for games criticism pose fundamentally different tasks for the someone who wants to explain what games are about. Hardcore gamers and the readers of the mainstream press ask very different questions of game criticism. When he approaches a discussion of a game, a gamer usually asks: “Should I buy this game?” This is typically a question about the quality of the gameplay in the game, how fun it is. The reader of non-enthusiast press, being generally older, is unlikely to have played enough games and developed the skills necessary to understand the details of a game's gameplay relevant to answering this question. Even if they could understand a breakdown of how the game's mechanics work and why they are good and bad, I can't think why a non-gamer would be interested. When they read about other media, laymen usually also ask whether or not the work considered is worth their time and investment. But they also ask: “What is this work trying to say?” In the past year you can find articles in major mainstream outlets who respond to this latter question, and it's cheering that games are beginning to receive the same sort of coverage garnered by other cultural objects like books and cinema and TV shows on a regular basis. But there are a few problems that come along with sticking to the latter question as well.

The first is that the virtues of many excellent games begin and end with their gameplay. What makes video games fun to play is for the most part not susceptible to chin-scratching analysis. It just is immensely enjoyable to shoot a zombie in the head with a shotgun. Explaining its magic is like explaining the Tristan chord. When you look at a game like Resident Evil 4, widely considered one of the best games of the last five years, you realize that this experience of throwing buckshot into the living dead at close range is that game's gift to the world. Beyond that it doesn't have much to say, exactly.

The second is that in some cases it's hard to explain what a game is trying to say without looking to the way the game's narrative and themes are mediated and reinforced by the gameplay. Games don't stand up to other media when it comes to the sophistication of their stories, but some have wed story to gameplay in such a way that they mutually reinforce each other and in so doing have produced experiences unavailable in other forms of art. In some cases, like the acclaimed game ICO, the central relationship at the heart of the story is almost entirely conveyed through play mechanics. It's hard to communicate how a game does this to someone who doesn't play games, but on the other hand you miss out on one of the basic ways that games can be artful if you don't try.

Tycho (not his real name) at the site Penny Arcade described his own approach, and his suggestive description seems like a good course to me: “It is my goal to play a game until I discover its thesis... Essentially, I want to know a game's intention.” This is different from asking what it tries to say; a game's intention might just be providing a determinate and new type of fun. But if games writers can develop the vocabulary necessary to convey a game's intentions to a wider audience they will have accomplished a great deal.

The Game Designer as Malignant Demon

Coletta Factor aka Spoiler Warning: Bioshock

While attempting to think himself out of radical skepticism about the external world, Descartes proposed the following scenario: “I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity.”

The main thing that differentiates video games from other games (say, chess and monopoly and sports) is the fact that the rules of a video game are not disclosed in advance. You can't play chess without knowing what rules govern the game: what sort of moves each piece can make (the knight moves in an L), and what conditions count as success (checkmating the opponent's King). In a video game, on the other hand, you have to learn the rules that govern your character and the world as you go. The first layer of rules govern your interface with your character-- hitting A makes your character jump, holding X down makes him duck. The next layer of rules govern what counts as success in the game-- you have to go this direction to reach the next level, you have to kill this enemy in order to get some item that will allow you to progress further in the game. While a game's instruction manual often provides some of this information at the outset, there is a sense that you don't really understand these rules until you have the controller in your hand and begin to work your way around.

Often, there is a character within the game whose role is to guide the player through learning and mastering these rules. In the Zelda games, for example, Link meets a fairy in the first village who instructs him how to swing his sword and where he should go for the beginning portions of the game. This device, using an in-game character to teach the player the game's rules, has been used in many many games throughout the years.

In the opening scenes of Bioshock, a first-person shooter developed by 2K Boston, the player encounters just such a character. As the player arrives in Rapture, an underwater art-deco metropolis built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan, he is contacted via radio by a man named Atlas. Atlas has survived a catastrophe that has befallen the city, and from a safe hiding place he directs the player through the game's objectives. As you play the first two thirds of the game, it seems clear that your goal in the game is to defeat Ryan and gain control of Rapture.

When the player finally reaches Andrew Ryan's office, the game delivers an unexpected reversal. Just before you enter, you learn that Atlas has subjected your character to a form of mind control. Everything that you have experienced in the game up to this point has been an illusion, created by Atlas through a form of post-hypnotic suggestion. His helpful direction through the game's world has been a covert form of command, all devised in order to make you kill Ryan and hand control of the city over to Atlas. When you enter his office, Ryan tells you that you have been subject to this plot; but as you kill Ryan you have no control over your character. You watch as your character beats him to death with a golf club, and Ryan repeats the same phrase over and over again: “A man chooses, a slave obeys.”

I see all this as a parable about gaming. When you play through a good video game, mastering the game's rules and using them to succeed in the game's environment, the game communicates a feeling that resembles agency. The feeling of empowerment that you get from adjusting to the game's logic and using this knowledge to overcome the obstacles in your way resembles the feeling of free choice, but it not. Games are an interactive medium, but in a real sense the designer of the game is the one who makes all the choices because they are the one who creates all the rules. The genius of Bioshock lies in the fact that it investigates this paradox in the context of the game itself. in Bioshock, the designer appears not as a helpful sprite but as a malignant demon.

If games are going to be about anything other than escapism, than they can begin, as Bioshock does, by exposing the very impulse that drives our love of games itself: the pleasures of being subject to rules that we do not choose.