EG Radio Ep3: Chocies and Consequences

Did a podcast over at EG. We talked about DLC, indie game bundles, and some specific points of Bioshock 2, Dragon Age, and others. Give it a listen!

EG Analysis: Critter Crunch

Puzzle games haven’t changed much since the release of Tetris, and for the most part they are highly abstract affairs. There is no narrative to Tetris, only gameplay in its purest form. Ditto modern puzzle classics like Bejeweled. Some have themes pasted on, like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, while others, like Puzzle Quest, add RPG elements. Yet the mechanics of all puzzle games are essentially the same – abstract color matching with the occasional tweak to powerups or multiplayer styles. Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

E.G. Impression: Heavy Rain

Pushing an art form forward often means looking past big flaws to the original genius underneath. While I don’t think originality for originality’s sake should be rewarded, when someone takes a risk that pushes against established norms, those who tire of existing paradigms should stand up take notice. With games even if the experience as a whole fails a breakthrough mechanic or risky procedural narratives can make an otherwise mundane or head-scratching title extraordinary. Continue Reading at Existential Gamer...

When Less is More

Book lovers frequently criticize movies and games on the grounds that they lack imagination. The minimalism of text, no matter how well put together, requires readers to constantly flex their imagination in ways not possible when visual images are given to you. But such critics have never waxed nostalgically for an old 8-bit game only to go back to it and realize how much their “imagination” had colored their memories with flashy graphics impossible on the hardware of yesteryear. There’s something about boiling a gaming experience down to its basic elements that allows one to focus only on the relevant mechanics and let your mind fill in the rest. Street Fighter alone offers several examples that attest to this fact. Continue reading at Existential Gamer...

Existential Gamer Update

It's been several months, a honeymoon, and a move since I last posted here - and this will probably be my last. I've posted my first post over at the Existential Gamer's new site. Go give it a read and add to your Feeds. I'm not disbanding PEEG, but don't expect to see much out of it in the near future.

Oh who am I kidding - you already weren't expecting much!

The Failure of First-Person Narrative

I've never been big on first person shooters. However the recent glut of writing about Modern Warfare 2 and its effective (or not so effective) "No Russian" level has got me thinking about many discussions of first person narratives lately. Far Cry 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and both Call of Duty 4 and World at War are all games that have garnered much critical discussion yet I've let them slip by me because of their genre.

These have sat in the bottom of my GameFly queue for a while so I was quite surprised yesterday when World at War showed up in my mailbox. I popped it in this morning with an open mind and was immediately impressed by its graphical polish. The interspersing of real footage with a dramatic stylized history lesson of America's involvement in World War II was made for the post-MTV generation. The tension of the opening scene - my character's capture and the graphic execution of a fellow Marine seconds before my rescue - pulled me into the game instantly. Unfortunately that excitement died alongside my fallen comrade the moment I picked up a gun.

Not being a veteran of first person shooters I felt more like a frightened James Sunderland who had never held a gun before than a hardened Marine. What button do I push to shoot? Should I crouch to avoid enemy fire? Who are these people yelling at me - My CO or a random AI grunt? How do I tell the difference between friendlies and hostiles when everyone looks nearly the same? While I realize the panic that grips a soldier during a firefight is a major reality of war, generally you have many months of order and training to fall back on that helps create order out of the chaos of the battlefield.

I had none of that training. Call me spoiled but I like having a tutorial available when I play a new game. World at War has none. Perhaps developers believe anyone who plays and FPS are "hardcore" and wouldn't need such a thing. Yet the game that renewed my interest in the genre, Battlefield 1943, did so largely because of the tutorial that held my hand as it explained the basics combat. Being thrown into a chaotic and dangerous situation where I have no idea how to protect myself creates the perfect atmosphere for a survival-horror game, but not so much for a simulation of war where your training and trust in your squad mates are essential to success.

Assuming the opening experience for veterans of the Call of Duty franchise would be markedly different and knowing I would eventually get the hang of things, I perservered. A few suspension-of-disbelief shattering moments aside (I'm talking about the CO who yelled at me for 5 minutes to kill one glitch-hiding hostile while the rest of my squad stood around doing nothing.) I reach the end of the second mission and a member of my squad is killed before me in a scripted surprise attack. Cut to the set up for the third mission and the aforementioned glitzy graphics lamenting the loss of my fallen comrade. Who was he? I have no idea. But apparently he was important enough to me in those two brief intro missions that I should be choked up about his death.

Two missions into the game and I have no real attachment to characters, or even, to myself. While it's still early in the game I think much of my distance from the game's narrative is that I still feel confused by what's going on around me. This is a problem that could easily be solved by adding a tutorial for nubs like myself and using that time to introduce me to my squad.

Anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket knows that if you really want to get into the psychology of a soldier you need to start with Basic Training. A game doesn't necessarily need to go that far. A a simple sweep and clean mission punctuated by down time where the player can overhear their squad mates talking - humanizing them - and scripted, hand-holding attack sequences would do wonders for giving a player both the narrative drive to care about their team and the tools to do something meaningful to protect them.

First person shooters do a great job of immersing the player in a world of limited vision and ever-present danger. They don't necessarily need a tutorial to do this if the player perseveres enough to learn the ropes. I imagine this is why many players stick with the genre. The learning curve is small and the gameplay immersion instantly gratifying. But a good narrative, particularly if a game aspires to create an emotional experience for the player, requires more than just placing a player with a pre-existing skill set into the heart battle. They need a reason to care at the micro-level, not just the patriotic thrill of a brief stylized history lesson. In the case of World at War they developers choose to give the player a name but it is really just that. No backstory, nothing to connect him to his squad. Maybe more of that is revealed over the course of the campaign, but they haven't given me a reason to stick with the game so far through either story or gameplay.

Post-Emo + Existential Gamer

Recorded my first podcast this weekendwith one half of the duo that runs Existential Gamer. Hopefully this will be the first of many to come as they're looking to add more contributors and redesign the site in the coming months.

It's quite nice to get some synchronous conversation going with another passionate, critical gamer. Give it a listen. We paint a pretty broad swathe from Batman to Demon's Souls to Uncharted to Geo Defense with some meanderings here and there to talk about gaming on a time budget as well as the potential (or lack thereof) for risk-taking in AAA titles.