Is Demon's Souls Hardcore?

Or does it just require patience?

We live in the ADHD age, where multitasking is commonplace and television shows have to pique our interest within 2 minutes or risk being passed over for 10 second YouTube snippets. Gamers, of course, are frequently thought of as the cornerstone of the ADHD generation. Look at the comments on most gaming sites and it's obvious that most commenters don't even finish reading the post they're commenting on, much less play the games under discussion with a critical eye. Not that there's anything wrong with playing games that way, but if there's one often overlooked reason for the rise of so-called "easy" games - games with few punitive measures or that emphasize flow over difficulty - it's that many gamers have no interest in being patient and watching an enemy's patterns before launching an attack. Yet this is exactly what Demon's Souls demands of the player.

It's interesting to compare Demon's Souls to God of War. Both games have a similar aesthetic and third-person hack-em-up style. Yet GoW-style games are basically button mashers. Aside from setting up for the occasional flashy combo you can hack and slash your way through the game with nary a thought of defense or anticipating enemy attack patterns. These games put the player into the psychological frame of mind of a raging barbarian. Perhaps that's the head space most gamers want to occupy. It is a fantasy after all - why have to worry about resistance or consequences? Kill, maim, destroy at all cost, with nary a thought for self preservation (there's very little chance of death anyhow).

Demon's Souls is the soft, exposed underside of God of War. Ostensibly you're engaging in the same behavior - kill, maim, and destroy - but not at all cost. Rushing blindly into battle leads to near certain death, even against enemies that are relatively weak against you. The price for failure is that you lose all the souls you've gained, and souls are the currency through which you become stronger and progress the game. Death isn't just a momentary setback that forces you to replay the game from a set checkpoint - it costs you all the progress you've made since you last "leveled up". There is a bit of grace involved. If you can fight your way back to the point at which you died you reclaim all the souls you lost, but you only get one chance at this. Die again and only the most recent death, and the souls lost as a result, can be regained.

The result is a game that borrows a page from the survival horror genre. Because death is costly and can come at any time if you're not careful the player has to slow down. Unlike survival horror, however, this concern for your avatar's well-being isn't in the service of fear per se (though the game is quite eerie at times). This concern makes you approach each fight cautiously and means you respect each opponent rather than thinking of them as expendable. There is something cool about needing to pause and size up your foe before every battle rather than thinking of them as a minor annoyance to be batted away. Even enemies far less powerful than you can and will take you down if you try to button mash your way through them. Sure, you may only have to strike them once to destroy them, but let a group of them surround you and they will repeatedly stagger you until you, literally, give up the ghost.

But this doesn't make for a difficult game. Heck, you can take down enemies much stronger than you if you are patient and watch their patterns (of course, if they can kill you in one hit it can bedifficult to learn their patterns!). So why has this game gotten such a rap for being "difficult" and "hardcore"? Have our gaming chops gotten so rusty that we lack the patience and intellect to analyze an enemy before we attack?

An interesting cross-case is Batman: Arkham Asylum. This game has - quite deservedly - gotten much acclaim and I don't recall reading any review that cited it for its difficulty. Yet the combat is similar in that it requires patience. Despite what most may think Batman is quite fragile - low level thugs can take him down with a few well timed hits so you learn very quickly to be patient with them. You have to utilize counter attacks because enemies can and will attack you while you're in the middle of dealing with one of their buddies just as they do in Demon's Souls. So why is no one calling Arkham Asylum "hardcore"?

Perhaps it's because combat in Arkham Asylum is specifically designed for you to be patient and counter - it's right there in the tutorial and the game makes it apparent when to counter thanks to Bruce Wayne's spider-sense like situational awareness. Or maybe it's because combat in Arkham Asylum is flashy. You are rewarded for extended combos which require patience to execute. Combat is also quite beautiful to watch - unlike Demon's Souls which looks good but gets stale quickly. These visual treats make the game seem easier despite enemies that are just as threatening and combat that requires patience rather than button mashing.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call Demon's Souls a thinking man's game its charm lies in the 3 P's - Patience, Persistence, and Pattern Recognition - rather than quick reflexes. Only in the ADHD age could a game be considered difficult for not rewarding quick reflexes above all else. If Demon's Souls is at all old-school it shows just how much the standards of gaming fun have changed since I got my GED.

PEEG Critique: Avataritis

The past week has seen an interesting bit of criticism in the blogosphere regarding character customization. Martyn Zachary leads the way with an intriguing discussion of why rampant character customization is not necessarily a good thing for narrative in games. Responding to the piece on his own blog Chris Lepine explores the psychological reasons why gamers are drawn to character customization. Both pieces are, unfortunately, a bit heavy on academic babble but once deciphered I think they open the door to re-thinking our obsession with custom avatars in games. I recommend reading both pieces, but you'll find a substantial summary below.

Zachary's original piece makes a compelling argument against using blank slate create-what-you-will character customizations as a narrative tool. Developers seem to think that letting players create their own protagonist will forge a greater empathetic bond, immersing them more fully in the gameworld. This only sells players short, however. Nothing about the external qualities of a protagonist - their gender, age, race, etc. - is necessary to fully humanizing them in the mind of the player. The internal facets of that character, the basic emotions and range of human experiences common to everyone, are all that need be fleshed out to create a relatable protagonist. Falling back on character customization, then, concedes that players need to be able to make a protagonist that resembles themselves or their external experiences if they are to relate to him or her and understand their motivations.

Zachary also claims that customization is a developer's answer to the rampant homogenization of protagonists, specifically the white male hero. Rather than utilize other races and genders as pre-defined protagonists many developers simply use customization in the belief that players ultimately want to see a protagonist that mirrors themselves (or an idealized version of themselves). White male protagonists were the norm before technology allowed for customization simply because that represents the largest, and therefore most profitable, player base.

Where Zachary argues that this sells gamers short - after all we can identify with a range of protagonists in other media with little trouble - Chris Lepine says that gamers in particular have developed an inability to relate to the inner lives of others unlike themselves. After a little detour into Reichean psychoanalysis he concludes that gamers have been unwilling to reveal their differences (their hobby) to outsiders in a society that often shuns gaming as an immature diversion. As a result, gamers have become insular, refusing to connect emotionally with the characters they play unless they fit a pre-defined mold they are already equipped to understand - the rugged white male protagonist. This is not necessarily a condemnation of gamer psychology - certainly not all gamers feel this way - but an explanation of why customization has become the selling point du jour. Lepine takes a different tack by claiming that modern gamers think the external background/appearance of a character doesn't represent who they fully are - it's just window dressing - but further they don't want to care. The internal lives of others, even our fictional protagonists, are off limits because our internal lives have been hidden and off limits for so long.

The difference between Zachary and Lepine's conclusions is subtle but striking. Zachary accuses developers of condescending to players in thinking they can't relate to characters radically different from themselves. Lepine, on the other hand, accuses them of thinking gamers are so stubborn and broken from years of marginalization that they won't relate to protagonists that they cannot modify into the exact image they want. Strangely, Lepine's conclusion leads to a industry-stunting spiral. Years of being marginalized as an audience have made gamers unwilling to allow the medium to change and grow in ways that would garner it more critical acceptance. Because games have been ignored as an artistic medium gamers curl into their shells and refuse to let games take them to difficult narrative places where the industry as a whole would be viewed as a more mature form of art, thus garnering the respect they desire.

Both pieces, though full enough as they are, leave open one crucial question. Why is it important for a player to relate to the inner life of the protagonist? What does a pre-defined, fully realized character offer in terms of narrative that can't be accomplished by letting the player create their own hero?

Giving the player the freedom to create their own hero means relinquishing quite a bit of authorial control. Rather than telling the story of a particular person the developer instead has to focus on crafting the story of a world, a setting in which the player generates their own story. When the player is in charge of crafting their own protagnoist, choosing their internal psychology and motivations (or choosing not to care about them at all) then the possibility of any pre-defined narrative exploration of their psychology is eliminated. The character becomes just a vessel to explore the world - the setting becomes the real protagonist.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. Many books and a handful of movie franchises have been successful on the strength of their setting rather than individual characters - the Ring of Fire and expanded universe Star Trek/Wars come to mind. But this shouldn't be the only type of narrative available to games. If we want the player to explore the inner life of a character they have to be fleshed out and meaningfully portrayed in advance, giving the player the chance to understand them from the inside and make choices based on what they believe is best for the character. It's relatively easy to decide as a player what course of action is best, particularly if your focus is on gameplay benefits rather than narrative continuity. It's easier still to make those decisions from the viewpoint of a customized avatar whose background you've decided for yourself and who, frankly, will likely be similar to yourself or archetypes you are pretty familiar with. To put yourself fully into the shoes of another, one who is fully realized with their own code of ethics and motivations, and then be tasked with deciding what to do with their life is to truly engage with with an interactive narrative. This is what I think GTA: IV tried to do. Niko Bellic is not a character whose psychology and background the player has any say in. His motivations are revealed through the course of the game but the player decides who he's going to be friends with and, in several situations, who lives and who dies. "What Would Niko Bellic Do?" is the pertinent question of the game, and a much more difficult one to answer than asking what I, the player, prefer to do or what course of action gives me the best in-game bonuses.

There's a possible literary corollary to this protagonist-as-avatar versus protagonist-as-setting distinction. All authors must make the difficult choice of whether to tell their story in the first or third person. This choice has radical repercussions on how the story is perceived and what information the reader is privy to. Most importantly, spinning a tale in the first person is generally the best choice for authors who wish to make the main character the central focus of the word. Few writers can convey the psychological complexities of a character in the third person as well as they can in the first.

First person narratives are the equivalent to games with pre-defined protagonists. Their story, their struggle, and how they interact with the world the author has constructed becomes the focus. When players are given a choice over how the protagonist behaves it should be in the service of better understanding the protagonist, not simply to find out what happen in the game world. This is the strength of first person narratives - they let us get inside the head of the protagonist with all of their biases and limitations. As players we do ourselves a disservice if we forget that and try to understand the game world from our own perspective rather than theirs.

Games without pre-defined protagonists put the emphasis on the world itself, or perhaps the characters in that world. The setting is a sandbox in which the player can test various identities for their avatar and see how the world responds to it. While the author still has quite a bit of control over how the world responds to different player types, the player interacts with the world to learn about themselves or the archetype they choose to embody rather than to learn to view the world from a different vantage point. This is a very valid way of gaming, but thus far developers haven't been explicit about these goals when creating games with player created protagonists.

The bottom line is that developers need to ask themselves what type of player is playing their game. If the player has no interest in story and only gameplay matters then no amount of backstory for the protagonist is going to draw them in - they're probably skipping the cutscenes anyway! Unfortunately the emphasis on character customization suggests that they are asking themselves this question and concluding that only gameplay matters. But of course the industry only seems to think gameplay matters because it has always been the only thing that matters, well that and flashy graphics. If we don't give players the chance to engage with deep and meaningfully different protagonists then we'll never see how important and powerful games as narrative devices can become. Unfortunately if that happens the industry has little hope of maturing into anything resembling high art.

Gaming on a Time Budget

Ok, I feel a bit sheepish doing this, but I've been wanting to write a blog post about this very thing for a couple months now. This article on the Escapist says exactly what I wanted to say though, so why repeat? Go read it.

What Do You Fight For?

There are many of us out here on the interwebs who take games seriously and urge others to consider the important lessons we can learn through interactive media. Unfortunately the very industry we are trying to protect and expand frequently fights against us with their belief that the best kind of marketing is still that which targets the testosterone-fueled adolescent male demographic. Think back to EA's "Sin to Win" debacle, the backlash to which some have argued was anticipated and even desired by the folks in EA's marketing wing in effort to ramp up publicity on the game.

Not all games aspire to take the industry to a deeper level of course, but even the lowest-common-denominator titles regularly churned out for the masses need not stoop to the level of juvenile humor to draw attention to themselves. Yet it's interesting what advertisements say about the games we play, even the ones that we find relatively innocuous.

The following two advertisements for Tekken 6 contain deeper messages that are completely at odds with one another. Part of a larger ad campaign centered on the theme "What Do You Fight For?" - an interesting question given the near Kojima-like obtuseness of the Tekken storyline - these two ads are radically different in their view of life's priorities. The first is a decent attempt at investing fighting with meaning and purpose as real-world fighters talk about their motivations: personal growth, justice, equality, even Christ (thanks Evander!).



While it may be a bit macho-saccharine in its execution and is ultimately in the service of a fairly standard gaming genre, at least it attempts to speak at something deeper expressed through the human desire to compete in physical combat. Seeing this isolated video might garner applause for the marketing folks at Namco for at least giving their potential audience food for thought.

Unfortunately those thoughts are far more interesting than they may have intended when you pair that video with the following:



Justice, equality, heels, and hair straighteners. Makes me want to ask the ad firm what market they're fighting for.

PEEG Critique: Lack of Substance Abuse

Got a new, hopefully weekly, feature for you here at PEEG. You've probably notice my experiment with a weekly feature in the form of my commentated news recap, and while that's great for stimulating my thinking and writing about things in brief quips I need to engage more deeply with something on a regular basis. To that end I'm going to put frequent blog reading to good use by highlighting and critiquing a notable blog entry or gaming related article each week.

This week's entry requires has some back story. Edge ran an interview last week titled Death of the Author in which three developers discussed the concept of emergent narrative and its potential to push developer scripted stories into the background in favor of stories authored by the players themselves. It's a concept that's been floating around a while and one I personally find exciting. However not everyone thinks the concept is so groundbreaking. Michael Sylvain accuses "emergent narrative" of being nothing more than an empty industry buzzword in his response to the interview titled Lack of Substance Abuse. Is this an important point? Does anyone really know what an "emergent narrative" is and, if so, is it even very important for the future of the gaming industry?

For most of digital gaming's history "story" was a brief framework under which the player is charged with a task. The only narrative needed in Space Invaders was that aliens were invading from space and you needed to stop them. Narrative was simply a backdrop - and an often unnecessary one - for gameplay. Can you really remember the narrative that drives most fighting game characters to do battle? Do you need to if you wish to play them well?

As storytelling in games has matured and technology expanded to allow more robust input from the player we've begun to find ways to give the player more control over the story beyond simple succeed or fail mechanics. This means developers have learned to be comfortable giving up some authorial control, but certainly not all. If a player can do whatever they what happens if they don't wish to engage in the grand sweeping story the developer has spent years putting together? What if Niko Bellic doesn't care about finding an old enemy, making money, helping his cousin, or exploring Liberty City? You can't give a player total freedom while maintaining any sense of a greater goal or focus. Perhaps you can provide multiple paths for a player to follow, but even so they are still finite and constrained by what the developer envisions - all outcomes are in some way scripted in advance.

Emergent narratives are the most recent proposed solution to this discrepancy between story and player choice. Such stories wouldn't be fully scripted in advance but somehow created as the game progresses based on choices players make or their successes and failures. But Sylvain doesn't think this concept holds water. In the first place there's too much hyperbole involved with the notion that an interactive story becomes a qualitatively new experience. The goal of all this emergent narrative talk seems to be to argue that the landscape of how stories are told is radically changed by interactive media, but this is just too much big talk with little to back it up.

I agree that in an attempt to legitimize gaming as a unique media we tend to scream positive accolades about our medium at every opportunity. Perhaps we shouldn't be quick to think "emergent narratives" or any other new idea will suddenly revolutionize the industry, making the broader culture stand up and take notice of what gaming is capable of. Heck, by the time we get to something like emergent narratives your average person who hasn't spent years learning how games work might not understand the process well enough to appreciate it anyway (like the analogy Chet Faliszek uses in the Death of the Author piece about audiences in the 50's wouldn't understand Memento).

But to give up and think the only thing interactive about games is the gameplay sells our medium short. We may not need to think in terms of creating grand-sweeping interactive narratives, but we need to expand the conversation around how the interactive elements of a game can push narrative in directions it hasn't gone before. It's not too grandiose of us to think there are narrative styles out there that cannot exist in a non-interactive medium, is it?

Sylvain's main claim is that there is a justifiable tension between the narrative of game - its story - and the freedom a player exerts by being an actor and having some control over the direction of the game. At its core the leap to talk about emergent narratives means we avoid a deeper exploration of the discrepancy between narrative and gameplay. I feel this is a very interesting and relevant point. Haven't we already created an interesting narrative in the ways we charge a player with completing a task while the larger story elements are beyond their control? What sort of fatalistic story are we already weaving in games as a result of gameplay and story frequently butting heads?

For example, Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII regardless of how powerful a party you create. While this may seems like a cheap trick that removes any sense of autonomy from the player, it tells us something about the inevitability of death and its repercussions (especially when you lose all the gear Aerith was carrying!) . Why can't we use this tension to explore meaningful concepts like fatalism a bit more?

Imagine a game about time-travel where the outcome is always the same regardless of the actions a player takes. This would let the player explore the breadth of their autonomy while leaving the ending essentially the same - you can't change the outcome but boy is it fun to try! The static elements of a game's narrative point to things that are most consistent about our experience playing a game. Similarly it is the static elements of human experience regardless of time period or culture that point to something special about the human condition. Authorial intent can play a similar role, but only when we stop avoiding so-called ludonarrative dissonance and look for ways to embrace it.

It's unclear whether Sylvain thinks embracing this tension can co-exist with innovate attempts to circumvent it. His resistance is to the unspoken assumption that emergent narratives will completely supersede any attempts to understand how to work within the limits of the current paradigm. I think both approaches are valid, and in fairness to the industry it's probably a vocal and idealistic minority of idealistic bloggers and developers - of which I include myself - who are calling for a rethinking of how narrative and gameplay interact. I doubt traditional storylines will relinquish their role as meta-game elements anytime soon.

Weekly News Recap 10/11/09

It seems like every week I'm talking more and more about the state of digital distribution so why stop now? This week CEO of Gearbox Software Randy Pitchford criticizes Steam for being a digital distribution service run by a a game developer. In his view Steam, run by game developer Valve, has a conflict of interest. Any digitial distribution service is going to take a little off the top for being the middle man. Don't they have the power, then, to hinder competition by charging more for competing games than they would for their own?

Pitchford recognizes the value of digital distribution but argues that the real value in any distribution service, even B&M stores, is whether a consumer feels that the distributor is interested solely in serving them, that is, giving them what they want rather than trying to push their own product.

Then again this may be a moot point as it seems that everyone is able to get in on a little digdis action. With Amazon joining the ranks of online and B&M retailers selling download codes for the PSN (and others) it seems your options for purchasing games are no more limited than they were in the days of pure physical media. The big question now is what kind of wholesale price do these distributors make and how much leeway do they have in lowering prices to create a competitive environment? I doubt any industry insiders will be giving us those numbers any time soon.

At least the high mucky-mucks aren't leaving us to fend for ourselves. The London Games Conference will host speakers on digdis which they are calling the biggest issue facing the games industry today. I'll try to keep updated on the proceedings - apparently this isn't something that's going to evaporate any time soon.

Switching gears a bit the aforementioned CEO of Gearbox has also spilled the beans about achievements. Apparently there's such a large culture of achievement (and by extension, trophy) whores that toning down the difficulty on your game's achievements is likely to net you thousands of additional sales. I wrote about the potential downside of trophies back when they were first added to the PSN. By and large my views haven't changed, but now that there's a tangible financial incentive to include trophies I hope that developers won't view them as a shortcut to higher sales in favor of developing better gameplay ideas. Trophies and achievements are strictly meta-game rewards and it would do well for developers to remember that and not think that a new set of achievements or an update that adds trophies is a legitimate tool for increasing the value of their games. Ultimately this mentality is more about marketing that moving the industry forward.

Weekly News Recap 10/4/09

The land down under may be doomed to another decade of gaming cencorship as one holdout Attorney General is keeping Austraila from incorporating a mature rating into its games classification system. Currently interactive media must contain content safe enough for a 15 year old or risk being refused classification and effectively banned from the country. While Michael Atkinson, the one naysayer, thinks games can have artistic merit it's not worth the risk of allowing children or disturbed individuals engage interactively with violent, sexual, or drug-related themes. Two things smell funny to me. First, not all games with this objectionable content include them in an interactive way. The current law would prohibit games with objectionable cut scenes (no matter how "artistic") would be refused classification. Secondly, this particular AG doesn't seem to understand the lessons one can learned in an interactive medium. If the worry is that acting out one's violent and/or sexual fantasies in a game might spur one to act them out in real life think about how many lessons can be learned by giving players an opportunity to act them out and suffer the in-game consequences of such behavior. Allowing someone to experiment with - and yes, see the positive side of - certain objectionable behaviors, along with the often inevitable consequences of those behavior is a much better "teachable moment" than simply shuttering all such behavior behind lock and key.

Now that the PSP Go has launched there is a wealth of information to follow up last week's news about the effect of digital downloads on the market. Responding to concerns that a first-party digital distribution system creates an effective pricing monopoly it's nice to see that third-party companies can choose to make price cuts - temporary or permanent - at any time. This is actually a beneficial change for the consumer as they no longer have to wait for retaliers willing to take a cut in profits by lowering prices on games they've already paid wholesale rates for.

There's also a handy price comparison chart for UMD games and their digital counterparts. Interesting reading, particularly with such a wide variety of price differences, some in favor of the UMD and others just the opposite. Important to note is that many hard to find or out-of-print games fetch exhorbidant collector's prices in physical media - a non-issue when it comes to digital versions.

If you're still not sold about the move towards digital distribution the Entertainment Consumers Association is putting together a petition and grassroots advocacy campaign for gamers rights with regards to their digital purchases. There's a lot of great information there and a wonderful place to get involved if you're worried about the future of games when borrowing, selling, and trading in are nothing more than boring facts we tell our grand kids.