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.

Battlefield 1943 versus Crash Commando: Two Perspectives on Spatiality

This entry is my contribution to the Blogs of the Round Table for this month.

I've been playing Battlefield 1943 and Crash Commando on the PSN quite a bit lately and it recently dawned on me that they are nearly the exact same game played out in different perspectives. They share an underlying pick-a-weapon-and-kill-or-be-killed mechanic but because one is a 3D first person shooter and the other a 2D side-scroller they are drastically different experiences for the player. I'm going to look at five ways in which they differ as a direct result of their spatial representation then decide if this makes one mode of representation stronger than the other. But first a quick run-down of the games.

Battlefield 1943

If you've played one online FPSer you've pretty much played them all but the general gist is as follows. You pick one of three soldier types (which determine the weapons available to you) and you and your team battle it out on small islands trying to capture and control specific bases on the map. Along the way you try to kill as many opposing players as possible. You see through the eyes of your soldier and have full control over direction you look. This is important because it is vital that you pay attention to the space around you. Attacks can come from behind, to the sides, and even above. Play continues until one side depletes the other's "energy bar" by getting the requisite number of kills, with more energy deducted per kill based on how many bases your team controls.

Crash Commando

The fundamentals here are the same as in Battlefield - pick a soldier (in this case a set of weapons) and destroy the opposition. Unlike Battlefield there are several game modes such as a free-for-all deathmatches and objectives-based maps where one team has to blow up certain objects while the other team defends. Crash Commando, however, is not an FPSer. You can see your character at or near the center of the screen at all times. Enemies are clearly visible when you are in range of their weapons and for the most part all the action occurs on screen. It's your classic 2D side-scroller so you never have to worry much about anything happening off screen.

Here are the key differences I see between the games.

Point #1: Crash Commando is less frustrating.

It's par for the course with either of these games that you are apt to get killed frequently when you first start playing multiplayer. However, repeatedly dying in Crash Commando doesn't make me want to throw the controller at the screen as much as it does in Battlefield simply because in almost all cases you can see who killed you. Heck, as a general rule you can see them before they kill you so you know you at least had a chance of taking them out first. Dying in Crash Commando is a matter of not being fast enough or accurate enough rather than being ambushed by an unseen enemy. In Battlefield you are often killed without ever seeing your killer. Without the HUD that indicates who killed you and how you'd never know who or what took you down! This sort of dead-but-don't-know-why is a staple of the FPS genre and generally what drives new players away from them, but it's largely unavoidable because your perspective leaves you blind to a large portion of what's going on around you at any given time. In Crash Commando your local area awareness is nearly complete regardless of how skilled you are at the game. You don't have to worry about controlling a camera to focus on threats so you end up feeling responsible for your own deaths because you could see them coming.

Point #2: Battlefield 1943 is more visceral.

Crash Commando is very bloody. Any death, even a clean sniper shot, causes a player to erupt into red bits. Battlefield lacks any blood - deceased soldiers disappear leaving only their packs behind. Yet Battlefield leaves me feeling more uneasy, more terrified, and more shaken after I've taken a hit or been fragged. The limited field of view makes you agoraphobic, always frightened of what may be lurking behind or to the side, or who may be straight ahead but too far away to see. Space in Crash Commando is far less open and far more visible and that makes you feel more secure at any given time, especially when no enemies are around. In Battlefield you feel as though you are at the center. Taking a sudden hit raises your heart rate as you scramble to find an all but invisible threat before it's too late. The difference in effect is similar to the difference between horror films that rely on shock value and those that are more subtle, showing less and letting the viewer's imagination create the scares.

Point #3: Battlefield 1943 encourages more team-based cooperation.

For the most part Crash Commando's "teamwork" consists of doubling up on firepower. Because any and all threats are visible on screen at all times there is little need to flush an enemy out into the sights of an awaiting teammate. Battlefield encourages this type of team work because it allows you and a partner to watch each other's back, letting you focus on threats in one direction without worrying about what may behind you. Without any real ability to ambush or need to protect one other other than when threats come from opposing sides Crash Commando's teamwork ends up feeling like little more than a Contra clone.

Point #4: Battlefield 1943 has a greater variety of distinctive weapons.

Strictly speaking Crash Commando has more basic weapons than Battlefield (11 compared to 9), but for the most part its primary weapons are identical. They may have different levels of damage, speed, or reload times, but with the exception of grenades and grenade launchers each weapon has the same range - the length of the screen. The 2D playing field limits the weapons' distinctiveness because you don't have weapons that are better or worse at different ranges. In Battlefield you have long-, short-, and mid-range weapons, each of which can be used at different ranges but with greatly diminished returns. Each weapon, then, has a unique feel to it and will appeal to different types of players leading to more diverse player types. In Crash Commando most players tend to play the same because once you've learned how to use one weapon you've basically learned them all.

Point #5: Crash Commando lacks a Roshambo dynamic.

One element common to many multiplayer games is the psychological guessing game offered up by some sort of rock-paper-scissors dynamic. In Battlefield this is based on the type of unit a player chooses and the range at which they fight. A sniper will take out an infantryman any day of the week, but a fast moving rifleman at mid range will make him wish he'd never picked up a scope. Crash Commando lacks this because its fast pace, relatively limited active playfield, and similarity of weapons means any player's weapon choice has a nearly equal chance of defeating any other player's weapon choice at any time. This puts the emphasis much more on your physical reflexes than the ability to analyze and predict what sort of weapons and strategy your opponent will use.

Overall it looks like 3D is the clear winner in this contest. While the way in which it limits a player's view may be a bit frustrating and therefore discourage many new players from getting into the genre there's a reason that side-scrolling fragfests haven't really caught on. Both the level of immersion and the depth of strategy are greater in Battlefield than in Crash Commando. It's unclear whether 2D side-scrollers are inherently incapable of delivering the dynamics of an FPSer at as high a level as an FPSer itself. Any thoughts on how to overcome some of these limitations?

Weekly News Recap 9/27/09

The past couple of weeks have seen a bevy of news related to digital distribution, a topic I've already spent some time ranting about. Of most importance is the revelation that Nedgame, Holland's home grown version of GameStop recently announced it is boycotting sales of the PSPGo. Obviously they just realized that selling users a piece of hardware sans a removable media drive is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. How can they continue to rip off customers by treating used games as their own personal "buy low, sell high" stock market if there is no removable media to trade* - the thing even comes with built in storage!

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't remember Circuit City boycotting the sale of mp3 players because they wouldn't be able to sell customers CDs for it (then again, they're out of business now - whoops!). This is the new gaming order here folks, and as far as I'm concerned the sooner price-gouging B&M-used-game-mega-stores go the way of the Jaguar, the better. But Nedgame also claims that Sony is creating a monopoly on software sales which raises an interesting point. Is a distribution service a monopoly?

Back in the 80's Nintendo didn't quite create a monopoly on game software, they just controlled what games were allowed on their system. It worked pretty well from a QA standpoint, though some cried foul. Sure we may miss out on the occasional deal of the day or liquidation sale noted at places like CAG, but if you look at a service like Steam you see that great deals happen all the time, not for any particular reason, but simply to give games more exposure. Without competition among distributors, though, we occasionally see some fishy pricing practices, notably that downloadable titles are more expensive than their boxed retail brethren. Sony promises to combat this discrepancy, but that doesn't necessarily mean lowering the prices on downloadable titles. After all, if there are no boxed retail versions to compare them to, parity is achieved, no?

That small economic speed bump aside there's only one more real barrier to full acceptance of digital distribution and that's advertising. How with the hype machine ramp up for Final Fantasy XIVVLXQ1ß if there isn't ample acreage of GameStop storefront upon which to affix posters? Fortunately a small change to the way our distribution interface works can fix that problem. This is evident by the way firmware 3.0's addition of "ads" in the XMB helped a little known title achieve record sales. It's easy for a small indie title to get lost in the shuffle of weekly updating, but a little reminder in the XMB can make all the difference in the world.

*I actually have no idea if Nedgame is as nefarious in their practices as GameStop. I'm just assuming. Haven't heard any rumblings of a GameStop boycott. Yet.

Weekly News Recap 9/13/09

Bit of a short news week this time around.

I've recently been turned on to the virtues of the FPS genre thanks to a friend getting me into Battlefield 1943. It's all the fun of WoW's battlegrounds without all the tedious grinding. Still, now that I'm on board I can't help but be disappointed that there are no immediate plans for additional Battlefield 1943 DLC. DICE says they are too busy working on other Battlefield projects. For once I understand the frustration players feel when a developer stretches themselves too thin. But it begs an interesting question - is it better to shoot for breadth or depth in a franchise? Both Valve and DICE seem to have settled on the former track, expanding their game universes through multiple releases rather than working to better existing games. The ability to support a game through dlc is relatively new and gamers may have taken to it so fast that you'd think it was their God-given right to have their favorite game supported until judgment day. Beneath it all though I wonder if it isn't a good idea for a specific product to continue to receive upgrades over time. Call it the MMO model. Imagine if a classic like GoldenEye were still supported with dlc. Perhaps Rare would still be a household name.

Finally Braid is only $5 this weekend. Did you hear me? Five bucks for Braid. Go get it.

Weekly News Recap 9/06/09

[Bit late on the recap this week owing to the holiday weekend and a road trip. On the plus side I finally have my HDTV back so I can, y'know, read the text of games I play]

Ever since he inserted himself polygonally into the tutorial for Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy I've had a bit of a mancrush on David Cage. There's something reassuring, if smug, about a director explaining, in-game, that you're about to experience something so different from the norm that he needs to break you of years of gaming habits. Now he's come right out and said that players should play through Heavy Rain only once. With re-playability a key selling point for most games that's quite a bold statement (badum ching!), but one I respect. I played through Indigo Prophecy last summer exactly that way - I didn't repeat sections that went badly, nor did I play through it again to get a "better" ending. IP, unfortunately, has its share of game over screens so I still repeated a bit, but it left a clear mark on my gaming habits. Now, rather than try to see everything, do every side quest, and get the best gear (I'm looking at you Crisis Core!) I approach games with a one-time-only mindset and I think it's high time more games made that take advantage of that kind of player. Hopefully Heavy Rain is successful because of it's consequence heavy game play and future developers realize the untapped story telling potential therein.

Not to re-ignite any hard feelings about the lack of BC on all but the earliest PS3s, but it's rather interesting what sort of creativity is engendered by constraint in the gaming world. In an effort to milk more money from the franchise Sony will re-release enhanced versions of God of War 1&2 for the PS3. Shameless attempt to make money though it be it strikes me as far more appropriate to actually take the time to update a golden oldie than to simply port it (I'm looking at you Wii Virtual Console). The work required to re-vamp a game for modern consoles is considerably less than building a game from scratch and greatly increases a game's longevity. Look at the great work Capcom did with Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Personally, as I get older I'm less inclined to keep old consoles around nor do I want to spend money to play an exact copy of something I already own. Giving me a little something extra is a great way to re-kindle nostalgia and let me show people an older game without feeling like the geezer who drones on about how much better Atari 2600 games were.