The Final Exam

In the latest episode of the 1up.com podcast 1up FM, there is a great discussion of the game Shadow of the Colossus that starts around about the 1:26:00 mark. I like this Backlog feature of theirs-- they've been playing through the game over the last month, and talking about it as they go along-- because it offers a much-needed outlet for discussion of games after they've been reviewed. As a result, the discussion moves beyond how fun the game is to play (the standard review assessment) and into the way the game influenced the panelists' views about larger questions in game criticism. A perspicuous and reasoned debate ensues in the last ten minutes about the role of narrative in games and the differences between narrative in games and in cinema.

I found all this fascinating because I think that Colossus is a model for how narrative ought to be done. The capacity to convey narrative through interaction is a constitutive rather than accidental feature of the medium. Every time a designer exploits this ability we get closer to finding out what kind of art games are, and what forms of expression are unique to games in comparison to other media.

All this talk about Colossus also inspired me to write about boss battles, because I believe that the game is the culmination of an interesting design heritage. Boss battles were first thought up in the arcades: at the end of a level (or segment of the level) you would run into an enemy that was just bigger and stronger than the rest of the enemies you faced. The boss could take more damage, had more damaging and harder-to-avoid attacks, and so forth. My dominant memory of boss battles during this era was that they were expensive. (I remember that you always had to have a row of quarters ready when you started to fight Krang.)

The first game I remember ever fundamentally altering this formula was the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. At the end of the second dungeon, you were faced with a Dodongo, an enemy that differed from all your previous enemies in kind rather than just in degree. The rhino-looking bosses could not be defeated by normal sword slashes; rather you had to get him to swallow your bombs by laying them out in front of him. You had to figure this out on your own by experimenting with your various items.

This fight, simple on its own, is the seed of two great design ideas, both of which have been developed to an impressive degree of maturity. The first idea is using boss fights to test the player's knowledge of the existing game mechanics and to teach her to apply them in new ways. (You can think of the Dodongo fight as the discovery of a new “rule” for the use of bombs.) In the later installments of the Zelda series, each dungeon would have a series of puzzles and obstacles organized around the use of an item found in that dungeon. And then the boss would be a sort of “final exam” to test your mastery of the new rule the game taught you in the dungeon: you had to use the techniques you've used throughout the dungeon in novel or more complicated ways in order to damage the boss. This template was perfected Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and descends into mannerism in Phantom Hourglass. This approach to boss battles has been a hallmark of the Metroid Prime series, and Okami used this idea to great effect by applying the principle to many of the game's non-boss enemies.

The second design idea nascent in the Zelda fight was making boss battles into puzzles. Beating bosses became not just a matter of moving faster and inflicting more damage, but fundamentally a matter of problem-solving. Just managing to inflict any damage at all became the central challenge of the fights. In the Zelda games you had to keep an eye on your environment and the boss' behavior in order to discover the trick to beating the bosses those games threw at you. Reasoning this solution out produces these “aha” moments-- moments where you recognize the designer's mind at work-- that are Zelda's great gifts to gaming.

I see Colossus as the consummation of this latter stream of evolution. Shadow of the Colossus introduces a minimalist set of game mechanics: riding, shooting arrows, climbing, stabbing. It eliminates all the levels and battles with regular enemies, and substitutes the exploration of a large and mostly featureless world. (This game has extremely slack pacing; it contains some long stretches of eventlessness that would make Andrei Tartovsky proud.) And finally, it constructs a set of meticulously designed environmental puzzles in each colossus encounter. These innovative design choices (along with its beautiful visual style and its subtle approach to narrative) make Colossus a unique experience, even though its basic gameplay ideas are part of a long tradition. It exemplifies a pattern that is true of other works of art: it draws upon the established forms of its forebears and transfigures them into something noone has ever seen before.

I Talk with my Ladyfriend about our Mutual Love of Pokemans

A recent Gamasutra feature by Brandon Sheffield speculated about the death of the hardcore gamer thusly: “Our games are too focused, too hardcore, and bear too much of the stereotype of “gamer.” What's the perception of this stereotypical gamer in the culture at large? “It’s common knowledge that game controllers are intimidating, that consoles have a certain stigma to them, and that most mass market consumers consider games to be either a waste of time, or actively detrimental.” Yikes. Sheffield thinks that the the growing popularity of casual MMOs will eventually help to put this outmoded stereotype to rest.

Gamers have a pretty bad reputation with the public at large, which they partially deserve, but I am convinced that the day will come when games will be regarded as one form of entertainment among others and not the exclusive province of the unwashed. One step in this direction is the recent increase of thoughtful writing about games in mainstream print media and mainstream cultural websites, and another is making games, as Nintendo is doing, that people outside of the core game demographic will find appealing and accessible. But these latter games can be hardcore games too. In this future, I think that the lure of hardcore games might begin to work on a larger segment of the public, because I've seen many of my non-gamer friends get sucked into some pretty hardcore games. A prime example is my girlfriend, who really got into Pokémon Diamond last summer.

I was really interested in how she got into Pokémon, because it's a sort of Trojan Horse game: once you strip off the layers of cuteness there is the ugly beating heart of a hardcore Japanese RPG with grinding, dungeons, and a complicated turn-based combat system. This is the kind of stuff she would never get involved with under other circumstances. In the past few years, as I've gotten more into gaming, my girlfriend's own gaming has mostly been limited to wiping the floor with me in Lumines Live. But last summer she bought a Nintendo DS and suffered a brief but severe case of Pokemania, so I decided to ask her what was fun about it.

Q: How exactly did Pokémon Diamond find its way into your DS?
A:: You had been bugging me to buy a DS for a while, finally promising that my buying myself a DS would count as a birthday gift to you. I'd been playing a fair amount of Pearl on your DS and you mentioned that if I got Diamond we could trade Pokemans. .

Q: So basically I got you to by a DS promising you Pokemans
A: And then I set about I raising my own fleet of fluffy, adorable, vicious assassins. I also liked that the Pokemen were totally subservient to my commands.

Q: What did you like about Pokémon Diamond?
A: The animals are both cute and useful. Also, I have some aggression issues

Q: How did you feel about it as a game?
A: I liked that it provided instant gratification. Just fighting your first couple of battles your Pokemen would level up quickly, but there were also long-term incentives. I got very greedy about my Pokémon levels. The more I built up my portfolio, the more I thirsted for greater power. I think anyone with a capitalist instinct could enjoy this game. It's the drive for accumulation.

Q: What finally killed your thirst to catch 'em all?
A: I walked away after a failed second attempt at victory road. I have a pretty hard and fast threshold beyond which I am no longer willing to sink further time and effort into doing well in a video game. It's not a particularly high threshold, which is why I don't get into many games. Pokémon was easy to pick up, and it tickled my lust for power. But my lust for power is much weaker in the video game universe than in real life. Watch your back, Kyrgyzstan.

Q: What was your favorite Pokemon?
A: My Infernape, Bouncer, was pretty reliable. And I had a Luxray named Trouncer. He was one of the few Pokemon who, in addition to being a good fighter, seemed like he could probably get some play from the other pokemans in his off-time.

Q: Aside from Pokémon what are your favorite games?
A: Mario Kart and Rock Band, and Lumines.

Q: In the future, do you think that games will be like comic books, where they will mostly appeal to a small group of readers or do you think games will be the sort of thing that everyone enjoys?
A: I think complex games with steep learning curves probably always be confined to a limited audience, unlike games like Mario Brothers. But I think game companies will increasingly focus on creating games that appeal to a broad audience, contributing to the destygmatization of video games in general. Unless peak oil forces us all to return to subsistence agriculture.

Q: Thank you for your time
A. C'est mon plaisir.

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