Category Archives: Digital Games

Why So Few Violent Games?

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With as much time as game designers and critics think and write about the specifics of game interactions, it’s often useful to step back and look at the basics. Let’s ask a simple question: why are there so many video games dealing with social interaction and relationships, and so few that explore violence and action-oriented gameplay?

In some ways, it’s a historical aberration. If Gygax and Arneson had made some war-focused game instead of Counts and Courtship, or Will Crowther had decided to entertain his kids with his obscure caving hobby instead of an exploration of his childhood friendships, perhaps the focus of our games would be different. Doom wouldn’t have been an oddball niche title if there were a hundred other games at the time about shooting aliens with guns.

But I think there’s a more fundamental issue at work here: violence and action are really difficult to simulate, unlike simple relationships.
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The Non-Interactive Stanley Parable

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A screenshot of two identical doors from The Stanley ParableThe author of The Stanley Parable says that “it’s actually best if you don’t know anything about it before you play it.” And that’s probably true. So if you like, you can play it before continuing.

While we’re waiting, a bit of background: The Stanley Parable is a game by Davey Wreden made in the Source Engine. It requires some form of the Source 2007 engine to play, which you have if you own Half-Life 2.

The Stanley Parable, for all its exploration of interactivity and choice and video games, isn’t actually interactive at all when you get right down to it. Yes, it has six endings and branching and all that. But as with many games with multiple endings, as soon as you tell the player that they exist, she wants to view them all. And especially with Stanley‘s left-or-right, red-or-blue choice structure, trying out the choices exhaustively is trivial.
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PO(r)TA(l)T(w)O

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Valve Software advertised their release of Portal 2 using an Alternate Reality Game, or ARG. A series of puzzles led to a game that encouraged players to play a set of indie games in order to release the game early. The players participated, and Portal 2 was released 10 hours early.

A lot of people are upset about this.

At first I was really confused about how angry people were acting, even accounting for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Valve had put together a cool set of puzzles, offered a bunch of indie games for cheap, and then actually gave players a real-world reward for playing. However, I’ve realized that the displeasure the ARG created is due to a classic problem in game design: miscommunication leading to false expectations.
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Convergence

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I was recently linked to “Convergence,” the first game by a group called Streetlight Studios. It’s a Flash game about growing up and making choices; it could be described as a mix of “Passage,” “Pathways,” and “How to Raise a Dragon,” which is a pretty amazing combination.

The game asks you to follow a character from infancy to old age, making choices along the way. Infancy makes you crawl around your house as a baby getting toys before your sibling, in an odd exploration platformy way. Adulthood has you balancing love and work; I’m glad that they didn’t make this drag on too long. Shades of “Every Day the Same Dream” here. Old age, at least in the ending I got, was more of a little vignette to cap off the choices made in the rest of the game.

Looking up at my description, this game sounds like a mixing-together of various art games, and it’s definitely inspired by the work others have done before, but the polish and design in “Convergence” makes it feel fresh. Definitely something to check out for fans of blocky pixel games about life and choices.

Character Progression in F.E.A.R.

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An enemy from F.E.A.R. seen through the scope of a sniper rifleI’ve resumed writing for GameSetWatch. My latest column just went live; it’s called Character Progression in F.E.A.R., and it’s about how increasing the player character’s options instead of increasing their strength can prevent a game from feeling flat.

F.E.A.R. was an odd game for me. The shooting part was fun and pretty and it was just the right amount of difficulty (or sometimes a bit too hard), but the rest of the game was… not very interesting. The horror elements rarely grabbed me, the story was almost pastiche, and the dramatic twists were clear to me after the first level. That’s not even bringing up one of the most offensive video game characters in recent memory. Hey, it’s a fat guy! And he’ll get bumbling clown music! And you’ll know that you’re about to meet him again when you see food wrappers scattered around. Seriously.

So while F.E.A.R. is technically advanced for its time and well-designed from a gameplay perspective, I was ready for it to be over about halfway through. And that’s never a situation you want a player to be in.

Ossuary Status: Steady, Sinful

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a preview screenshot from Ossuary showing some stylized people standing around in a dim museumEarly in March, I previewed my next game, “Ossuary.” It’s coming along nicely, although the screenshots are still rather boring. I’m focusing on getting the puzzles together before fleshing out the art and writing. I’ve got a whole lot of content in already, though. Some numbers:

  • 15 puzzles done out of a projected 30
  • 49 NPCs; the final game may have over 75
  • 248 lines of dialogue out of perhaps 400 or more

This is sort of what I was talking about a month and a half ago with respect to the cost of content. I’ve done very little in-depth programming on this game. Most of the time has been spent writing dialogue and hooking up the logic between the various NPCs. To be sure, this is still coding, and it can be interesting and tricky, but it feels a bit daunting.

“Ossuary” has no procedural content, so every minute of playtime the player experiences is the result of ten or thirty or sixty minutes of my development time. There’s a concept in film called cutting ratio that measures how much footage is filmed compared to how much ends up in the final movie. A cutting ratio of ten-to-one is perfectly acceptable. In game development, even if you never discard any code, there’s still an incredible concentration of developer time into player time.

Ludus Novus 021: Tin Medals

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Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 021: Tin Medals
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In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss achievements and how there are a lot more aspects to them than are immediately apparent.

The music for this episode is “The Temple” by Out of Orion and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License.

This podcast is certainly not a complete discussion of the topic, so please leave any input or feedback in the comments section.

Joining the Knights of the Five-Sided Temple

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A fragment from an imaginary walkthrough to my current work-in-progress, “Ossuary:”

2. Fortitude

2.1: Joining the Knights of the Five-Sided Temple

In order to gain access to the temple, you will need to get past the outer gate. Speak to the outer gatekeeper and tell him you are a FRIEND. He will let you through.

Speak to the Recruitment Officer in the western tower and ask him about himself (“ABOUT YOU”). He will mention that he doesn’t want to be greedy about getting a better position. Sounds like a way in, but we’re not yet corrupted by Greed.

Speak to the inner gatekeeper. He doesn’t want to let you in, but it sounds like he’s a bit overworked. Corrupt him with the sin of Sloth. He’ll sit down to rest and let you in.

Speak to the Lieutenant on the west side of the keep. He’ll say he’s happy, but keep asking him “REALLY?” until he confesses that he wants the commander’s position. You’re now corrupted with the sin of Greed. Go back to the Recruitment Officer and corrupt him with Greed. He’ll admit that he’s always wanted to be a drill sergeant, and ask you to speak with the commander on his behalf.

The commander is in the center of the south wall of the keep. Talk to him about the RECRUITER, and he’ll ask that you check with the Temple Clerk about the recruiter’s experience. Go to the Temple Clerk and talk to him. He sure doesn’t seem to appreciate the effort that the Recruitment Officer puts in! If only you had a sin that made people understand the viewpoints of others.

Corrupt the Temple Clerk with the sin of Envy. He’ll admit that he’s envious of the Recruitment Officer’s experience in his job, and that he deserves a promotion. Inform the Commander, who will ask you to inform the Recruitment Officer. Return to him, and he’ll enlist you as his final act in his old job.

What do you think? Too convoluted? Not convoluted enough? Any suggestions?

Welcoming the Player to the Game Space

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For many of us, games occupy a special space. We play games to escape, or be entertained, or to feel things that are hard to get from everyday life: terror, brain-bending challenge, or victory over an opponent. Because games represent a different world, it can enhance our experience to emphasize that separation. Some gamers have a special spot in the living room where they game, or a pair of headphones that only get used for games. Maybe you turn off the lights, or have a certain dice bag that represents the transition into the gaming space.

Burnout Paradise

Recently, I’ve resumed playing Criterion Games’s Burnout Paradise, an open-world car stunt and racing game. When you start a game of Burnout Paradise, you’re greeted at the pre-menu loading screen with the opening bars of Guns N’ Roses’s song “Paradise City.” This song plays through the menu experience, and continues to play even when you start the game. The song always plays once when you start, and then the game’s background music proceeds to whatever selection it’s picking from.

“Paradise City” serves as a theme song, marking the transition from the “real world” to “game space.” Because you hear the song every time you play, it serves as an almost Pavlovian trigger. The song becomes associated with the fun and the action of the game, so it helps to put you in the mood for the game as soon as you start it up.

Alan Wake

Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake has a structure that also lends itself to a transition into the game space. Instead of levels or sections, Alan Wake is divided into “episodes.” Each episode ends with a large “end of episode” message, a credits song, and usually a cliffhanger. The next episode then starts with a “last time on Alan Wake” montage, reviewing the story so far. This helps keep the player up-to-date on the (somewhat convoluted) plot and helps to break up the game.

This technique would be even more effective if it were incorporated into the game’s start-up experience. When an episode ends, it presents a natural stopping point, but the player is instead sent directly into the next episode. Instead, the developers should have returned the player to the main menu, to view the new episode-related main menu background and manually start the next episode. This way, the end of an episode would encourage the player to transition back to the real world, and it would be more natural to resume the game before the review montage instead of just afterward.

Tales of Monkey Island

It would be especially effective if Alan Wake dynamically generated a review montage every time the game started, showing the current episode’s intro and then short clips of what had been accomplished so far. Telltale Games’s Tales of Monkey Island episodic game series does this in text form; the game greets you with a short review of the story so far to welcome you to the game experience. With Alan Wake‘s greater development time and budget, it could have contained a video form of the same idea.

Too often, games make the start-up process and menu system an afterthought. While a game might be stylistically excellent, the initial user experience is frequently marred by long unskippable sponsor logos or simple, dull menus. It can be jarring to move from a spartan main menu into a rich game world. Instead, games should take a lesson from Burnout Paradise, Tales of Monkey Island, and Alan Wake: welcome the player into the game space from the moment the application starts, and make the menu experience one that facilitates the transition into the world of the game.