The Nightmare Scenario

Here's the thing: I love comic books. I grew upon them. While my mother gave me life, Marvel comics was my official wetnurse. I subscribed to the Fantastic Four during the mid-ninties (that period was not a high-water mark for the series); like most comic book nerds, I spent my pubescent years attaining a fine-grained recall of the history of the X-Men and admiring the colossal and statuesque slab of womanhood that was She-Hulk. (The Beatrice of my adolescence was a heady amalgamation of Stephanie Seymour and She-Hulk) I left off the habit during high school, not in order to acquit myself of nerdery entirely, but just to seek out other forms of nerdery (read: musical theater) that led to more promising (read: female) forms of social engagement.

But I developed a newfound respect for the medium during college, when I went back and read the work of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and the critic Scott McCloud. This respect turned partially on my appreciation for the versatility and narrative depth possible within the confines of the traditional superhero genre, but also on the inherent formal possibilities of the medium: the way that the arrangement and organization of images in sequence could be used to reinforce, undercut and shape the meaning of the words and images themselves. There were self-conscious artists, like Moore, who were using these formal tools to expand the expressive range of the medium and tell different stories, stories that aspired to the complexity of characterization and formal rigorousness I demanded from other forms of art.

I could probably tell a similar story about my love of games, which I left off playing during my college years and rediscovered as a graduate student. Games are a young medium with a lot of potential-- maybe even a greater porential than comics-- but they've been shoehorned into catering into the narrative and experiential needs of the teenage male. But like many gamers of my age and tastes, I hope for a future where video games break out of the historical path laid out by comics. The hoped-for scenario goes like this: the audience for video games expands to the degree that the public comes to regard them as one form of entertainment among others, and begins to become economically viable to make products that reach beyond the teen male demographic. There will be, as there is for cinema and television and literature, a creative space large enough to sustain a wide range of games with different sorts of artistic and narrative ambitions. The development of the medium so far offers grounds for hope on this front, especially as gamers mature and come to demand this sort of thing.

But there is also, in the form of the cultural history of comic books, what I call “The Nightmare Scenario.” A confluence of factors (craven self-censorship brought on by public hysteria over the effect of violence and sex on children, lack of nerve on the part of the artists and writers and editors, a business environment that favors creative conservatism) led comic books down the road to ghettoization in popular culture.

Psychonauts developer and writer Tim Schafer offered a well-fleshed out synopsis f the nightmare scenario in an excellent interview with Playboy magazine: “The thing that scares me most about the games industry is what's happened to the comic book industry. Comic books are an incredibly powerful art form as well, but they've been relegated to kid stuff for so long that now the comics that aren't kid stuff are called "underground" comics. So the comic books that are mature and have adult themes and are about emotional issues and are really powerful, those are underground? Those are the ones that should be the most mainstream because they apply to all people, not just the plots that are supernatural or fantasy oriented. So I feel comics is a medium that hasn't found its whole potential because it got locked into a limited corner of popular culture. Games could be teetering on the edge of that. And the problem is that very few publishers want to go in the directions that I'm talking about. A lot of the fans do, but there is no publisher in the world who is saying right now they believe games are art. They just want to go after where the money has been so far. And that's exactly the kind of thinking that killed the comics industry”

I wish I knew how games are going to find a different path; from the perspective of cultural history, they share so much with comics. Even if they have all this potential as a medium, it will matter naught if the audience for the games that realize this potential are a niche within a niche. Shafer's comments are primarily directed towards the business side of things, and as I've written before I think a lot of the responsibility for the creative narrowness of games lies at the feet of the publishers. But as the audience we share some of the blame as well. Who's to blame for Psychonauts being a colossal, developer-bankrupting failure? How about Okami? It might be promotion-- these games have an audience who would love them if they only knew they existed-- but at the end of the day the reality is that there isn't an audience for these games, at least not yet. And where there is no audience there is no economic wherewithal to support creatively ambitious games. Gamers are the only ones who can save the future of the art form from the nightmare scenario, and so far we haven't done much to sustain any optimism for that future.

Addendum: Steve Gaynor has a great article on the comics versus games issue, which raised some hackles and put forth some great points I didn't touch on here. It also led to some good commentary and exchange, so check it out.

Three Methods of Game Design

The author received another positive notice from the blogs today. Dear Ms. Bauer: Thank you for your kindness. As Shakespeare wrote, “Fear not, 'till the Reese's Fast Break do come to Dunsinane” Now our kingdom is overthrown, but we can't say that we didn't have a good run. Hopefully I shall require your legal services in later life. Thank you for being a friend. Yours, Iroquois Pliskin

I was listening to the GFW radio the other day, as is my wont, and something Robert Ashley said really stuck with to me. He was comparing the game design methods of Will Wright (the creator of The Sims and head of the studio formerly known as Maxis) and Shigeru Miyamoto. He related this anecdote to raise a point of comparison: When Miymoto was creating Mario 64, it turns out that the very first thing he did was have his programmers design him an open garden environment in order to put Mario through his paces. He spent the early stages of development tuning and re-tuning Mario's controls until they were perfect, by nailing down the feel of Mario's jumping and movement.

I feel like there were few moments of my gaming youth that I remember vividly, but the very first moments of Mario 64 stand out in crisp definition against the indistinct welter of childhood games. The tactile quality of the interactions and the indescribable kineticism of the movements had been refined in a way that I had never experienced before. Everybody remembers this moment, how thrilling it was just to jump around the environment. The story illustrates the core of Nintendo's distinctive method game design. Nintendo's hallmark as a developer is the refinement of the controls; even their subpar games control well, and their greatest games (Wii Sports, Mario 64, WarioWare) transform control itself into a form of revelation.

As Ashley eloquently put it, Nintendo creates a world out of play. Wright, on the other hand, operates by making a game out of the world. His studio has always taken a complex dynamic in the world-- the social development of cities, or the course of evolution, or human social life-- and then turned the laws of that phenomenon into rules in a game. Wright's games are, in an odd way, an attempt at scientific description: each of them purport to describe how some aspect of the world works. (Civilization is like this, too, except it's offering an interpretation of the determining forces in world history.)

Having to be a game that is fun to play puts some limits on this procedure. But Wright shares this basic method with the great number of game designers that strive for realism. They just put the accent of the idea a little differently: what they're trying to do is to capture all the minute details of the empirical world and create virtual worlds that have all those features. Whatever its problems as a game, GTAIV shows that the pursuit of the detail necessary to create a more visually believable world is worth the time and hardware. It informs us that there are new things still to come from this direction.

While the other current-gen consoles have pushed the technical capacities required by visions of this sort further, the Wii's bequest to posterity is its introduction of a new form of play into the home. Nintendo's staked its empire on the joys of mere motion a few times already, and won. Now, it's funny to remember how we doubted that this was a winning proposition.

Why WarioWare is Game Design DNA

Strip everything else away, and all videogaming is about hitting the correct buttons on a controller with proper timing. When you hear David Jaffee discuss his dream-game, sometimes you get the idea that the holy grail of his game design theology is the production of what he once called “pure play”-- his aim is to mine all the pleasures of hitting buttons in the correct rhythm. But for my money, Nintendo's WarioWare games are the closest anyone has come to this goal.

I think that the distinctive pleasure of gaming comes from the enjoyment we get in learning rules and putting them to use in problem-solving. But I'll make a distinction in that motto and add some definitions, because it'll help me explain why I love these games so much. There are two sets of rules that govern a game. “Interaction” is governed by a set of rules that describe how movements made with the controller are translated into movements on-screen. So one set of rules is basically all about how you manipulate your controller in order to get your representative in the game to jump. “Gameplay” is governed by a set of rules that describe the macro-level goals that count as successful progress the game-- what sort of jumping will keep you alive, what sort of jumping will kill your enemies and get you to the end of the level. Now, in my opinion most of the fun of long-form modern games comes from on the enjoyment of learning the gameplay rules. Usually you just want to learn the interaction-rules as quickly as possible so you can turn them to your advantage and get about conquering the world, fragging noobs, saving the princess and so on.

But the makers of WarioWare had a genius idea: Why don't we make a game that's 90% figuring out how to interact? Instead of constructing up a longer game that continuously elaborates on a basic set of actions and offers a series of more complex goals-- making another Zelda, say, or even a shorter game-- why don't we just make scads of miniature games that each have their own new and different conrols, and then challenge the player to figure out their rules in five seconds?

This line of thinking gave birth to WarioWare: Micro MegaGame$ for the GBA in 2003. WarioWare stripped all the adventitious elements from modern games-- continuity of plot, character, visual style, controls, everything-- and replaced it with just one task: figure out how to do something. Each level is made up of 15 or so “micro games.” In each microgame, the screen flashes a verb at you: “avoid!” “jump!” “shave!” “don't get caught!” “pet”! “feed!”, and then the game appears. You have seconds to figure out how it is that you make this verb happen, or else you fail.

As the verbs indicate, the games themselves present the player an assortment of arbitrary and bizarre tasks; because there is no need to sustain any narrative among the games themselves, the menu of interactions and verbs open to the designers are nearly inexhausible. The art team capitalized on this freedom, and as a result the parade of bizarre gameplay scenarios that whip by at a dizzying pace have this inspired lunacy to them. Because the underlying game play mechanics are just as mutable and random as the madcap collage of differing visual aesthetics-- photos, cartoons, classic 8-bit games, anything. It's a smart marriage of form and content. This is difficult to get across in words so here's an example for the uninitiated:

What I discovered by playing WarioWare is that learning rules can be made even more fun by keeping 'em simple and then forcing the player to learn them fast. Sometimes you happen upon the correct move by chance (when all else fails, hitting “A” a bunch of times is a good policy), and even then your own accidental competence can be amusing.

Since the series has branched out to other platforms, the Warioware team has kept it fresh over various iterations by building the new games around new control mechanics. WarioWare Twisted!, maybe the best of the series, adds new controls into the mix by attaching a gyroscope onto the cart itself. It sounds crazy, but it's amazing to run Mario across world 1-1 by physically spinning your GBA around in space. In this way, the WarioWare games perfectly suit Nintendo's hardware philosophy, which has won this console generation by showing how essential the basic pleasures of control and interaction are. (Don't be surprised if WarioWare: Balance Board Redonkulosity appears in stores this Spring.)

The WarioWare team are also responsible for the Rhythm Tengoku series, which will be making an appearance on DS in America this fall in the form of Rhythm Heaven, unlike its great GBA predecessor. (Still the only game I've ever imported, and worth it.) You should keep a lookout for the game when it comes over, I feel it will fly under the radar unless the critics get some word of mouth going. So, Listen to your friend Stephen Totilo.

The Hardcasualist's Lament

Dear Reader,

I have been up too late playing Braid, and now there is no time to blog.

I offer you the following as a holdover, which turns out to be very apropos:


That's one to warm the hearts of the diehard Viva fans out there, a cohort that numbers well into the teens. It's made entirely from Burger King figurines, from what I gather. Such passion befits its object; Don't sleep on Viva.

If you are confused by this, click here.

Yours,
Iroquois

PS-- Don't sleep on Braid, either. Listen to your friend Chris Dahlen.

PPS-- To learn more about the plight of the hardcasual gamer, check out Mitch Krpata's new taxonomy of gamers.

My Name is Nico, and I"m a Law-Abider

I'll be honest with you. I'm not crazy about emergent gameplay. I like to mess around with some high-caliber firearms and the island of Manhattan at my disposal, but nine times out of ten I would prefer to hand sixty bucks over to a designer and have him give me interesting things to do, rather than having to come up with them myself. I'm shiftless and lazy that way. But on the other hand, I never cease to be amazed by the bizarre ways that gamers will use games with open-ended rules to create weird projects for themselves.

For example, I heard once about a group of players who modded GTA: San Andreas to turn it into an MMO and then spent their time in the world acting like normal human beings. Driving to work in the morning. Sitting in traffic. Obeying stop signs. When I heard about this, part of me thought that this was the nightmare scenario envisioned by Adorno: the crushing banality of modern life had reached such a pitch that people no longer fantasized about escaping from their daily lives through culture and narrative. But on the other hand, it had the feel of people yearning for a just and sane society within the context of a game whose primarily associated with hooker-killing in the public mind.

So last week, on a whim, I decided to play GTA IV as a regular law-abiding citizen for as long as I could tolerate it. I didn't abandon a life of hired killing (I conducted a few missions during this time, during which I displayed my usual effortless grace with a carbine rifle), but I decided that in the time between missions I would conduct myself like a normal citizen. I stopped at red lights, and refrained from running over pedestrians to get from point A to point B. I tuned the radio to Tuff Gong and I spent the time between the missions soaking in the sights and sounds of liberty city. The whole exercise was oddly compelling, maybe because it added perversity into the mix. Because I spent some time in the game behaving myself, the misbehavior really had a punch that was lacking all the time I spent plowing through crowds of pedestrians. I felt kind of bad, and it was enjoyable. There was just something fun about blending into the law-abiding citizenry and saying to myself: “Nothing to see here, folks, just another mild-mannered killer among you on his way to work.”

Aside from the inherent perversity of this exercise, one reason I enjoyed this brief episode of sanity was that it accorded with the role I had been crafting for Nico all along as I've played GTAIV. As many critics have noted, the narrative created by the missions that advance the plot has this weird schizophrenic quality to it: on one hand Nico is presented as a sympathetic and sane man, and on the other hand he shows no compunction about gunning down the whole membership roll of construction workers' local #145 if the money's right.

Although the narrative choices you get to make outside the context of the missions are slight and even trivial, I feel compelled (maybe for this very reason) seize whatever small opportunities the game affords to craft a coherent persona for Nico, a role that does something to resolve this conflict. For some time now I've been quasi-consciously modeling my version of Nico after Robert DeNiro's character in Heat. I may be a professional criminal, but in my off-hours I wear expensive suits and treat Kate McCreary like a lady. When I'm not on the clock working as a cool-headed assassin I try to cultivate normal human relationships and avoid breaking the law. I play pool with Dwayne and drive Little Jacob to the airport. This is just the role I got to play in my brief stint as a law-abider.

The experience has also led me to reevalutate the social-networking aspect of the game. I dabbled in friendships for a while at the beginning of the game, and then jettisoned the whole thing mid-game when I set about chewing through the rest of the narrative in search of the end. (I havn't gotten there yet.) Now I'm back to valuing them gain. Let me explain why.

Jonathan Blow, in a recent lecture, said that the social aspect of the game is a sign of a fundamental conflict between the narrative and gameplay in GTA. The gameplay rewards of maintaining a network of friends and girlfriends is negligible-- the rules of the gameplay, in a way, tell the player that these relationships are unimportant. But from the standpoint of the narrative these people are the most important figures in the game; it is only through interacting with them that you get a to see Nico in any other role than that of the hired killer. If the only way a game can signal to the player that some aspect of the game is important is by giving him gameplay rewards, then GTA really is conflicted. I think Blow is right about how gamers are typically motivated, but I also think he is wrong about the conflict in the design; the narrative bits are the reward. The only reason I've stuck with Dwayne or Little Jacob or Kate are to get the few bits of conversation where you hear Nico reflect on all the insanity that fills the rest of the gameplay.

Maintaining the network of friendships is cumbersome. It feels, distinctly, like an obligation. When I agreed to give Little Jacob a lift I didn't have his car full of discount-guns in mind. But I do have this feeling that going through these chores I give Nico his only shot at redemption. The missions are all about Nico's descent into crime and his increasing thirst for money and revenge, but you get a chance to do something else with him outside of that life and the scripting is just good enough to make me care about taking that opportunity. Maybe there isn't a different ending, maybe there isn't some different gameplay or narrative outcome that derives from taking the time it takes to act like a decent human being whenever possible, but even so I feel like it is important to me to make it a part of how I play the game. Maybe there's something to emergent gameplay after all.

I have not told my garden yet/ Lest that should conquer me;

When I returned from a brief and console-free trip home this Sunday, the first thing I did was download the full version of Pixeljunk Eden. (I had to run yet another firmware update just to get into the store. The PS3 has too much computer in it and not enough console) I am glad for the brave new world of online distribution, where it is possible to obtain games like this for 10 bucks without leaving the house. I haven't invested a lot of time in it yet (there are some non-videogame related duties to be discharged here at the house of Clu), I've had the game on my mind ever since I started playing the demo last week.

A while back Michael Abbot discussed how modern video games have begun to widen their expressive range; when they were tethered to the arcade there was an imperative for a video game to challenge the player as much as possible for the shortest amount of time. A life at the arcade was likely nasty, brutish, and short unless you were very good at the game. With the transition to home consoles and the PC long ago, games broke with the design imperatives of the arcade; this led to the creation longer and less death-intensive experiences in the long-form narrative genres like adventure and RPG games.

But what we are seeing recently, it seems to me, is the flowering of a new design aesthetic within the short-form arcade game. Pixeljunk Eden retains the simple and easy-to-master mechanics of an arcade game, along with the short-form play length-- you can learn the game's mechanics and play a level in five minutes. But in lieu of mercilessly barraging the player with difficult obstacles in that time, Eden allows the player some air to breathe. It brings some leisureliness to leisure. Traversing the platform-style gardens is a matter of making a series of long, swooping leaps from plant to plant as you swing from the end of a line of silk. Rarely had a video game felt graceful to play. Rarely have I felt that excelling at the game is a matter of making just a few, carefully plotted actions rather than many quickly plotted actions, but Eden's gameplay has this very feel to it. Because pollen-collection is the basic goal in the game, sometimes your best course of action is just to hang on the end of a branch and wait for the wind to blow the pollen your way. The gameplay itself conveys a sense of tranquility; although you always feel like you know how to progress you seldom feel a sense of pressure.

The game's visual and audio aesthetics represent a skillful fusion of form to this content. Through the art style and music, the game reinforces the sense of calm created through the play mechanics. It is as if the game's art staff thought: “what does it feel like to play this game?”, and then sought to reproduce this feeling in visual and aural terms. The monochromatic color scheme, which favors bright blues and greens, gives the screen an uncluttered look, and the music has a loose, unstructured quality which suits repetition.

While the individual gameplay and artistic elements of the game are clearly borrowed from other games-- Rez, Everyday Shooter, Bionic Commando-- the sum of these elements and their implementation is really novel. They reflect an attempt on the part of the designers to do something different to the player. Games have been very good at creating certain experiences-- fear, empowerment, amusement-- but they have rarely sought to inspire the sort of peacefulness that Eden does, and I think this in itself is an achievement.

The emergence of the downloadable space in this console generation has been a real blessing for the console gamer who wants to see new and innovative efforts of this kind. (I know there are things on the PC that would blow my fragile mind, but I just can't seem to get into playing games on the object I use to check email recently.) Sometimes you saw a real standout like Katamari Damacy, but the economics of retail distribution just don't seem to favor unusual short-form games like Eden. I'm hoping that this space might become a safe-haven for games of this kind with offbeat and artsy ambitions for the medium. I would never have thought that the game I have been anticipating the most for a long time is coming to Xbox live arcade this Wednesday.

A Modest Proposal

Dear Nintendo,

There is still a chance to preserve the image of the storied Pokemon brand. You've had a good run, nobody disputes that. But there is no getting around the fact that Pokemon is based on the enslavement of wild animals for the purpose of bloodsport.

God knows we all love it. Who doesn't love having an army of trained animals bloody the sands of the arena for your prestige and profit? But it is only a matter of time before the other shoe drops and the public at large realizes that the beloved Nintendo brand is associated with a game that is turning our pliant youth into Ron Mexicoes. You can stave off the inevitable by slapping some electric mice onto puzzle blocks from time to time, but we all know that the coal that fires the engine of the Pokemon brand is the human thirst for cruelty. I offer you a final chance to salvage your carefully-crafted reputation for the avoidance of corruption.

Surely you remember Rare, they used to be in your employ. A few years ago they released the commercially unsuccessful animal husbandry simulation Viva Piñata. Nobody played this game, because it was far to complicated for children and far too adorable for the Halo crowd. The people who got the most out of it were old people immune to shame, like myself, who got sucked into the game's wonderfully deep gameplay and spent the next few weeks coming up with obscure naming conventions for our herds of squazzils and bunnycombs. (Characters in 18^th century french novels, British Moralists, members of Led Zeppelin.) While the game had some gorgeous art design and many of the animals had some real zazz to them (you had to ignore their connection to a horrible kids' TV show) it failed to find an audience.

Here are the facts on the ground. Viva is already half-Pokemon. (The other half is The Sims.) It combines the fun collecting adorable animals with the thrills of housekeeping. It is a fantastic game, and if the general public were aware of its existence it would be a smash. You already have an actual product called My Pokemon Ranch available on WiiWare, which has successfully tapped the Pokemon consumer's desire to merely wander around a fenced area populated by their squad of Pokemans. This is a game that would benefit from some actual ranching. Why don't you give the consumer a break from pitting Pokemon against each other in a contest to the death and have them facilitate some Pokeman romance through careful ranch maintenance?

You work out the details, and it will sell millions. I hereby waive my usual finder's fee.

Yours,
Iroquois Pliskin