H. T. Parnell's

Endsong

2011-03-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

New Guest Post on Alpha-Build: Endsong.

Afroshoto

2010-08-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Just thought you should know that there's a new post by me up on the Wowhead blog, about public gaming and how games improve real life skill sets.

It can be found here.

2010-07-30T13:57:00.001-07:00

Guest Post of mine up on Alpha-Build: The Benefit of the Doubt. So why don't you mosey on over there and check it out.

Victory Conditions

2010-07-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

So I've been replaying Final Fantasy 6 recently, and I'll spare you the “OMG I FORGOT HOW GOOD THIS GAME IS” talk, but something occurred to me.

For those of you that don't know (and even those of you that do), there is a moment, after what is more or less the apocalypse, where you wake up in control of single character, only to discover that you and your adoptive grandfather have been stuck on an island for over a year since the catastrophe, and Celes (your character) has only just now woken up. There used to be a few other people on the island, but they've since died of either disease or sheer ennui. As far as you know at this point, Celes and Cid are the only human beings left alive at this point, and Cid has taken deathly ill.

You're presented with a minigame, in which Celes catches fish to feed to Cid, in order to nurse him back to health. Fast fish add to his gauge, slow fish subtract, and it slowly drains over time. If it gets up to 10, he recovers, and if it gets down to 0, he dies.

The weird thing is, you can't lose the game at this point. Ultimately, it makes no substantial difference if he lives or dies. Either way, a short series of events transpires that end up with you on a raft, trying to make for the mainland, in order to discover if there's anyone else out there.

Whenever I played this game as a kid, I would always save Cid, since I wanted to beat every possible challenge set before me, and it really wasn't that difficult. I had never even seen what happens when you let him die.

That is, until this most recent time. When you come in to feed Cid, and you've let him die, Celes checks on him, discovers that he's dead, and runs from the room in tears (accompanied by her theme from the opera earlier). She walks to the northernmost point of the island, and throws herself off the cliffs, figuring that with everyone else gone, she has nothing left. She nevertheless survives the fall, only to find the raft that Cid was secretly working on before he took ill. Why he didn't mention it before escapes me, but there you have it.

From the connection you have to the music, to the little save point-ish sparkles they use for her tears as she falls, it's easily one of the most emotionally powerful moments to ever come out of a Super Nintendo (perhaps only second to Lucca telling Robo at the end of Chrono Trigger: “Don't pretend you don't care when you're really sad”).

The scene if you save Cid, however, is kind of an anti-climax. He... feels better then tells you about the raft. He stays on the island, and you can visit him any time you like after you get an airship. Kind of... well, boring.

And yet, because I was presented with success/failure conditions and the task was easy enough, I never saw this different, decidedly superior path for the story to take. This has gotten me thinking: when the most dramatically interesting path for a story to take involves a character failing at the task set before him/her for no reason other than their own personal failings, what's a game designer to do?

I realize this is a bit of a soapbox issue for me: If I refuse to take control away from the player at any point, how can I craft any kind of emotionally engaging situation that requires the player's character to act in some way?

Malgayne, as I was talking with him about it, really hit the nail on the head, I think. If I think of myself as being Celes, then clearly I have to do everything within my power to save Cid, but if I think of myself as a 3rd party, guiding the story, then it frees me up have something happen because I want to see how it would play out.

In a game like Mass Effect or Fallout, there could never be a moment in which the villain gets away because your character falters at the crucial moment, and lacks the resolve to pull the trigger. Or, more appropriately, if this ever happens, it must either happen in a cutscene, during which you have no control, or events must occur that make your hesitation functionally irrelevant. If it significantly changed the course of the game from every point forward, the workload would be, at this point, prohibitively high. I would like to think this will not always be the case, but that's where we are right now.

And even if you were given the choice to have your character hesitate, and not shoot the villain at the crucal moment, all Keyzer Soze style, how many of you would honestly take that chance? The “Game Over” screen has conditioned gamers everywhere that failure to accomplish your originally intended goal means that you stop playing the game. JRPGs and that whole genre has, by this point, devolved into a story (occasionally a very engaging one) that you must pass a series of largely unrelated challenges to experience. If you fail a challenge, you don't learn any more of the story until you beat said challenge, so the impulse is always to try as hard as possible to beat every fight put in front of you. If I was legitimately afraid that I would go game over, I would have my character kill the villain right then and there, out of fear I would have to replay some part of the game because I failed the challenge.

But it's not as simple as “well, give players the option to make their characters fail on purpose without ending the game”. Take the example of feeding Cid the fish: I didn't want to save Cid because I cared about his character that much, or because I really identified with Celes and her struggle to find an anchor in the cruel new world she had found herself in. I wanted to save Cid because the game had given me a challenge, and dammit, I'm going to win, even if it involves nothing other than walking up to the shoreline and mashing the A button to pick up fish. Frankly, if a game tasks me with something, I want to be able to succeed at it, but I have a lot of difficulty imagining how you could design a challenge for which the success condition involves your character throwing herself off a cliff in despair.

I think the real problem here is that when I say “game”, people think “success/failure conditions”. It seems like the industry would benefit from moving more in the direction of something like Daniel Benmergui (his website can be foundhere), who has always been fairly clear that in most of his games, while there may be some conditions that can be described as more positive for the characters involved, there's rarely one set of circumstances characterized as a goal for the player (other than perhaps experiencing all possible permutations of events).

But most of these projects are small in scope, and deal with the player's control over a small number of variables. I would say “I hope that this take on games evolves into something with the relative size and scope of something like Mass Effect of Final Fantasy 6”, but we all know it will eventually. It only took 24 years for Mario to make it up to the first Mario Galaxy, so let's check back around 2030, right?

Re-Blog

2010-05-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as a blogger retweet? It's not quite cross posting, and it's not quite plugging something.

Anyway, all ya'all should go over to Concepts by Thomas van der Heiden, and check out his newest set of illustrations. They're character sketches for a pitch he and I worked on in the past. Good stuff.

Acting Without Acting

2010-05-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

Though I haven't touched on it much recently in my writings, (aside from a few scattered comments about Super Street Fighter 4 on H. T. Parnell's) I've been thinking a lot more about some of the old discussions I've had about gender roles in games. The conclusion we seemed to come to, amid much discussion, is that there are two separate problems at play here:

First, the overall dearth of female characters in games, particularly ones that are portrayed as capable of engaging in the same activities as men with the same level of skill.

This strikes me as a larger umbrella issue that contains the issue of patriarchy that was brought up re: Super Street Fighter 4. Women are less common (in games) than men, because men are seen as the norm, so that the variation of including a female character is something that must be both explained and reigned in, as to not be too unusual. Addressing the overall problem may not address some of the co-morbid issues, but it's certainly a place to start.

Second, the overall dearth of emotional qualities that have historically been considered “female”.

This is particularly sticky, however, because by describing these as qualities as “female”, I am implying that they should be embodied, mostly, by female characters. Doing so would be the fastest way to solve the actual physical gender imbalance without actually helping the problem in any way. Not unlike trying to push for civil rights by giving a lot of work to Stepin Fetchit, and even then it'd probably be worse, cause there's something to be said for being the first African American actor to ever be given a screen credit.

Even discussing this issue is a little troublesome, though, because it's so easy to accidentally jump horses mid discussion, and to start discussing the specifics of people, as opposed to looking at platonic forms of female and male. That is, if you think that such platonic forms exist/are meaningful concepts. I tend to think they're helpful for discussions of narrative, but trying to prove that they are is clearly beyond the scope of this particular discussion. Suffice it to say that I believe that they are. Perhaps I'll diatribe about why at some point.

This issue is also difficult, because it's more insidious and subtle than the problem of “Over 80% of game characters are male”. This problem (as is the case with all problems of equality, if you get down to it) starts in the culture. America, and to some degree Western Europe (though less so) has always greatly valued physical prowess, self-determination, and the ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps no matter what, even so much as to be to the detriment of qualities like endurance, intuition, and being conciliatory.

The real heart of this second problem is that games buy into a mentality in which a "male" way of acting is considered positive, and a "female" way of acting is considered negative or irrelevant. This is partially because of overarching cultural factors, and partially because games in particular have always been based almost exclusively on these traditionally "male" activities. So, before we get too deep into this, what the hell am I talking about?

In the Jungian sense (as well as the ancient Chinese philosophy sense), activity is considered to be an essential male characteristic, while passivity is considered to be an essential female characteristic. There's a valid epistemological question as the core of this, to ask whether “not doing something” can be a valid descriptor, but suffice it to say that Taoism, for one, sidesteps this issue entirely.

Taoism, which focuses heavily on the interplay of gender as amorphous characteristics, largely detached from any instantiation, believes that the essential female characteristic is “wei wu wei”, or “action without action”. The comparison is made to water, which, while soft and yielding, is capable of overcoming virtually any obstacle, and shaping things otherwise thought unassailable, like earth and stone. Taoism submits that the universe has a natural order, and that by acting in step with (and being lead by) the natural order, not only does one achieve more satisfaction, but one is also more effective at accomplishing their goals. (As a purely academic concern, it also proposes that this is the ideal way for everyone to act, but still identifies it as inherently female)

I'm not here to speculate about the truth of this theology, other than to say that I believe there is some non-zero amount of validity to this way of acting: action based on sensitivity to surroundings, and non-attachment to the results of said actions.

Whether or not these qualities represent something inherently “female” is an epistemological gender studies question that I have no interest in tackling. I am much more interested in the relative lack of these qualities, and others like them in games. For lack of a better term, and wanting to avoid overstepping the purview of this article, I shall refer to these qualities as “wei wu wei”.

A previous essay I wrote posited that most main characters of video games are extensions of the typical male action hero. Gears of War, Devil May Cry, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead. Even Gordon Freeman, while more nuanced, is basically that archetype. While trying to gender these characteristics is probably a mistake, we can all agree that the laundry list looks something like this:

Physical Prowess
Resourcefulness
Willingness to use physical force in order to accomplish one's goals (usually noble)
Wit
Endurance
Courage and adherence to goals in the face of overwhelming odds

Plus many others, I'm sure. Don't get me wrong; these are all awesome characteristics. I really kind of enjoyed that Marcus Fenix and his squad getting swallowed by a worm the size of rhode island occasioned no more pause from him than “Well, then we gotta cut our way out!”

But characteristics like intuition, social graces outside of the context of manipulation, sensitivity to surroundings, nurturing, and willingness to stay in step with the natural order (or even fighting for the natural order) are all characteristics that are all markedly different than, or, in some instantiations, even directly opposed to, the list above.

The problem, as has been elucidated before, is that it's pretty easy to make a game about “you did this awful thing to me, so I'm gonna beat up you and all your cronies”. Making a game about building relationships, synthesizing disparate pieces of information, or achieving success by gaining immunity to the throes of gain and loss of daily life are all... a little less unclear. I think a game could be made out of these principles, but no one can submit that it would be less challenging to create than a beat'em up.

Now, if we're discussing real life, obviously a mix of all of these qualities are necessary to be a functional human being, but this is not so in games. The world of Gears of War is constructed so that Marcus Fenix needs to embody all of the action hero characteristics to succeed. The problem is partially the characters, where no one is creating characters that embody these wei wu wei characteristics, but it's also that before the characters even are introduced, the game mechanics and the story frame success and failure in terms of your ability to succeed at those very particular kinds of action hero tasks. When you get swallowed by a giant worm, it's undeniable that the appropriate response is to try and get out. To do anything else would mean failure of the challenge set before you.

And that's just the point: games are almost universally about events to which the only appropriate response is to be an action hero. Just putting in characters that embody this kind of wei wu wei thinking wouldn't do anything, because they would be monumentally ineffective, unless a conscious effort was expended to make it not so. This isn't because the action hero is the baseline, and variance must be accounted for, but just because that kind of mentality is so ingrained into the game industry.

This is to say nothing of the difference between valuing wei wu wei in story vs. valuing it in gameplay. JRPGs have done a decent (or at least the best available) job of emphasizing the value of wei wu wei in story, but at the end of the day, 70% or more of your interaction with the game consists of you fighting people for the purpose of ending their life or preserving your own. So you're left with a poor choice at the end: do I have a final confrontation that doesn't reinforce the message (the value of wei wu wei), or do I have a final confrontation that the player cannot meaningfully participate in? Obviously, the stakes of the fight are greater than just preserving your own life, but if the final victory is still won by the action of killing the bad guy...

Final Fantasy 6 errs on the side of the former: While you are fighting for the preservation of life, and the ultimate validity of human existence, Kefka can't be brought into the fold of Terra's quasi-Gaia worldview, and so needs to be fought and killed for the safety of the planet and its population.

Xenogears errs on the side of latter: While you fight and beat the boss, the planet is still more or less screwed until Elly steps in, who manages to save the day, ultimately by forgiving the villain, and making him understand the value of her worldview.

So... how can the action of “making someone understand the value of your worldview” be made into an engaging game mechanic?

Just a heads up...

2010-05-11T11:06:00.001-07:00

For those of you southpaws out there, I just recently wrote a review for the Razer DeathAdder: Left Hand Edition for the Wowhead blog.

It can be found here.

I Shoulda Been A Mathematician...

2010-05-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

(Comments continue on the post below. I encourage you to check it out.)

I've been replaying Xenogears recently (which I've already gone on about plenty in other posts), so I'll try to stay away from why I like it so much, but it made me realize something.

While I love it, I'm always reticent to describe Xenogears as a "good game". No one will ever tell you that it didn't have tons of problems: Low resolution sprites, the inability to speed through dialogue, repetative Gear Battles, the lack of a map, poor pacing, occasionally awkward dialogue, and the fact that they clearly ran out of money earlier than they expected, and had to drop half a dozen minor plot threads, just to name a few.

And yet, I still love the game, and have played it start to finish multiple times, despite it taking over 40 hours.

It seems to me that the issue of whether or not a game is "good" is kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is "Am I enjoying myself?", but this isn't really meant to be a treatise on the subjective nature of experience. Of course everybody reacts to, and therefore enjoys, different experiences to different degrees. I suspect, however, that everybody has a little mental dial regarding games, on which there is a zero point, under which a game is not worthwhile, and over which it is. Every game gets placed somewhere on that dial based on all the elements that make up a game (let's say story, gameplay, and style. Sure it's an oversimplification, but looking at that is for later), multiplied by some coefficient representing how much emphasis you put on those things at the moment, all of which is modified by some coefficient based on how many other demands (self-imposed or otherwise) you have on your time.

So:
[A*(quality of story) + B*(quality of gameplay) + C*(quality of style)]*(Scarcity of time) > 0

is the formula by which you determine whether or not you're going to play a game. Of course, all of these are too difficult to nail down for a formula to actually be useful, other than perhaps a stylistic overlay for a bunch of game reviews.

What this points out, though, is that while the quality of a game is the quality of the sum of its parts, for some players (like myself), no amount of failure on some fronts can make up for truly exceptional story, gameplay, or style. I play Xenogears because the particular story they tell rates very highly on the "quality of story" spectrum for me, and I'm predisposed towards having a very high coefficent associated with narrative.

Likewise, I play Borderlands because the style column is through the roof, and solid multiplayer is a strong boost to the gameplay column. Without multiplayer, the lack luster to non-existant story means it just barely eeks in above the zero line.

I would describe myself as having a huge coefficient for story, a moderate one for gameplay, and a small one for style, with bonus points going towards stories that emphasize personal relationships and the fantastical as juxtaposed with low fantasy, as well as big bonuses for strong co-op multiplayer, and well tuned competitive play.

Or, in typical H. T. Parnell Fashion:

Story is the best
Things are better with your friends
Graphics can suck it

What about you?

The Coming Revolution

2010-05-06T12:50:00.001-07:00

So, I've been musing a lot more on the topic of my last blog post: The lack of pushing narrative boundaries in games, and the more I think about it, the more I realize it reflects my general lack of satisfaction with most venues of the entertainment industry.

Seth Godin, in his blog, talks a lot about how the traditional ideas behind marketing don't work anymore. Spam, junk mail, and the like have become so intrusive, and privacy has become so scarce that in order to effectively market to someone, you must have their permission. (He even coined the phrase “Permission Marketing”) Likewise, he talks a lot about the benefits of having a product, service, or some other identifying characteristic that is worth talking about.

I know, of course, that railing against Hollywood and the derivative nature of most films isn't worth your time, but I'm starting to think that the entire system is broken.

Movies are expensive. They need to gross about three times as much as they cost to make in order to be a good investment. If I'm going to sink over a hundred million dollars into a movie (not in any way unreasonable), unless it grosses at least three hundred million dollars, I'm losing money. If it grosses only one hundred million, I've lost two hundred million dollars. It's hard to imagine a studio surviving that, and even if they did, anyone and everyone involved with the decision is going to get the axe.

Add in to this fact that I could pay 10 dollars for a movie ticket, another 10-15 for dinner, double that plus a babysitter if I'm a couple with kids, and I'm paying $60 to see a movie (and that assumes 10 for the ticket, which we all know is pretty generous). If I want to see “Up in the Air”, am I going to pay $60? Or am I going to wait 6 months, and get it from my netflix account for virtually free?

The best possible motivation for actually going to a movie theater is when it provides something you won't be able to get at home: spectacle. And with the advent of 3d TVs, that's under fire too. (This is not to say that movies in 3d are the only kind of spectacle, but for the moment, it's an easily identified one)

But all of this leads to a system in which studios need to be constantly trolling for the next huge smash hit, to pay for all of the movies they make that aren't smash hits. If you're constantly looking for the next big thing, and know that a wrong decision could cost you your job at the drop of a hat, which movie are you going to make? Something that's weird and new and edgy? Or something with an established IP that you know is going to bring in a decent number of people?

To some degree, I know that this is the way that it must work. Indie projects (be they games, music, movies, or any other kind of entertainment) are indie because they enjoy such a small market share. With money comes responsibility, and responsibility changes people. But I can't help but look at what's coming out recently, and go “Really? This is the most original stuff that Hollywood has to offer?”

Simply put, I think a crash is coming, and I, for one, welcome it. Just like Seth Godin proposes that the current paradigm of marketing (yes, I just legitimate used the word paradigm, pardon me while I punch myself in the face) is dying, I wholeheartedly embrace the (hopefully) coming breakdown and rebuild in the way movies are made and distributed. Hopefully whatever rises from the ashes is something that rewards creativity more than our current system.

Now if only we could push the game industry to the same place...

A tiny sliver of GDC Reflections

2010-03-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

This year at GDC, I organized a dinner, the goal of which was mostly to sit around and bullshit for a while. Malgayne has already written a post about the benefits of such a thing, which I would not attempt to duplicate.

At one point during the dinner, though, Dan C (of Lost Garden) was asking people what they had seen this year at GDC that had them excited. There was a lot of discussion about the IGF, and new ways of playing games that people were hearing about. Dan himself, I think, even mentioned a real time ocean sim that drew all of it's information from actual marine biology monitoring programs, tagging and whatnot.

It was during this conversation that I realized that I didn't really have anything to add. I mean, I could have contributed to the discussion, to be sure, but I didn't have anything, game mechanics wise, that I had seen that year that excited me.

Part of that, of course, is that I spent all my time networking, and didn't really see much new stuff, but I think it hints at a more fundamental issue, which is that game mechanics, on the whole, don't interest me much. Or, perhaps more appropriately, they interest me so much less than story.

While I could have brought up some issue of unbridled pathos that I had seen in a game recently during that discussion, and it would have made an interesting segue; it would be just that: a segue.

Though... I wonder if there's anything I could say for the quality of pathos in games recently. Is there something out there that I've been missing?

Street Fighting Women

2010-02-22T12:55:00.000-08:00

With the upcoming release of Super Street Fighter 4, I'm looking forward to a chance to be able to play Makoto, my character of choice from 3rd Strike, since I had some difficulty fully supporting the aesthetic of any of the newer Street Fighter 4 characters. (Rufus? Really? If I work up one morning and discovered I had designed a character like that, I would split my time between confused remorse, and desperately trying to plan how to live the rest of my life with that fact, not unlike as if I had gotten an awful face tattoo after a night of binge drinking)

But I can't decide if I should be glad that I'm leaning towards possibly the only reasonable female character in Super Street Fighter 4, or I should be sad that she's basically just tacking “Tomboy” onto the long list of stereotypes that Female Street Fighter characters belong to: No-nonsense Female Cop, Female Cop with Attitude, Schoolgirl, Wise Woman, Kunoichi, and Sexpot Martial Artist. (That's Chun Li/Cammy, C. Viper, Sakura, Rose, Ibuki, and Juri.

If you look at the basic archetypes (or stereotypes, depending on how generous you're feeling) of fighting game characters, particularly low fantasy ones like Street Fighter, you realize that female characters usually belong to archetypes that necessitate being female: the schoolgirl, the tomboy, the sexpot. Male character, on the other hand, usually belong to archetypes that are gender neutral: the bitter rival, the dirty fighter, the villain, the grappler (unless you expand “grappler” to mean “gigantic gay bear wrestler”).

I'm no gender studies expert, but there's GOT to be a name for the unfortunate tendency of female presence in a traditionally male dominated activity to be something that needs to be actively accounted for.

And yes, Zangief is totally gay. Get over it.

Chain pt 8

2010-02-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

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Chain pt 7

2010-02-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

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Chain pt 6

2010-02-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

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Chain pt 5

2010-02-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

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Chain pt 4

2010-02-02T13:56:00.000-08:00

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Chain pt 3

2010-01-29T15:39:00.001-08:00

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Chain pt 2

2010-01-26T16:57:00.001-08:00

Yes, I know I said Fridays. How silly of me. Presenting the next installment: (The first installment can be found here)

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A little "sumthin' sumthin'"

2010-01-22T12:23:00.000-08:00

GK (who can be found here and also here) and I got together a long time ago, and put together a little project (or as I like to call it, a little "sumthin' sumthin'"), which is finally ready for public consumption. I'll be posting a new page every friday, so stay tuned. For now, here's the cover and page one.

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2009-12-19T15:49:00.001-08:00

Been a while, right?

Well, I've been writing for the Wowhead Blog, sadly.

Latest Post:
http://www.wowhead.com/?blog=133775.3#comments

On the Serious Side

2009-07-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

I'll have to grind out my own thought on the subject later, but all interested gamers (who are living in a cave, and therefore haven't heard of this already) should head over to Man Bytes Blog, and check out Corvus's thought on the whole Tim Langdell debacle.

More thoughts to come.

Chutes and Ladders

2009-06-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

Fight This T-Rex wrote a blog post a while ago all about the fact that moral choices all kind of turn into economic transactions, which is oddly parallel to a quick comment in a post on Speaking Natalie that points out the same thing regarding the primary moral decision in Bioshock.

At some point later, I added to the pile with a rambling post about Tabula Rasa main characters, and how the unwillingness to assign personal characteristics to characters without the player's input turns “moral choice” into a ridiculous parody of actual choices.

Clearly, at least some people out there agree with me that this is a problem, but I don't see much of this opinion in most of the industry blogs that I read. Maybe it's been so well established that everybody takes it for granted, or there was a two-month flurry of posts on the subject (Like Braid reviews) that I just happened to be in the can for, and am now behind on my collective internet knowledge, but it seems unlikely.

I've already said my piece, so I won't shove it down your throat again, but I think the problem is that the ultimate creatives behind a game need to trust that a well written game will drive home the magnitude of a moral choice that you make. KotOR featured a bunch of items that could only equip if you were good, because they didn't want the game to be harder for someone playing as a light side Jedi, and they needed something to make up for all the extra money and experience you got if you were evil.

I can't tell if that sprung from a misunderstanding about how difficulty interacts with enjoyment, a misunderstanding about the IP of Star Wars in the first place, or a misunderstanding regarding the motivations for ethical behavior in the first place.

Maybe it's just because it intersects with something I already feel strongly about, but I can't help but be suspicious that it's at least partially the last one. Why does a fictional character engage in ethical behavior? (The “What is ethical behavior?” discussion is for another time)

I see three main reasons why characters in the media engage in ethical behavior, and quite frankly, I haven't been satisfied with any of them for a long time.

1. For personal gain: Rarely is this ever particularly overt, but in a game like KotOR or Fallout 3, your character only has the personality that you give him/her. If you make a moral choice because you think the rewards are better if you do the right thing, isn't that just engaging in ethical behavior for personal gain? It's rarely ever addressed as such, and when doing the right thing for personal gain is addressed in games, books, movies, or television, it's usually painted in a negative light, but when it's not explicitly addressed, it just sort of hangs there, and the implicit message is carries varies from just “Don't worry, life is fair, we proimse” to “Why you do something doesn't matter”, neither of which I can make myself endorse.

2. To avoid punishment: This is great for “Dora the Explorer”, but it's also pretty much the only motivating factor in ethical behavior in any sitcom ever. The “Aww...” moment at the end of every sitcom you've ever seen is based on the bumbling husband wanting to do something nice for his wife so she stops being angry at him because of the stupid thing he did at the beginning of the episode. Not to mention the fact that it seems to do a decent job of describing the childish understanding of Christianity that only exists in the heads of nut jobs, its detractors, and the mainstream media, but that's another issue for another post.

3. A commitment to doing the right thing: This is the most amorphous and boggling to me. Maybe it's short sighted of me to think this way, but you know that conversation in a serious movie where somebody is struggling with a difficult moral choice, and the supporting character leans in and says, “You have to do the right thing”? There's always a niggling thing in the back of my head that asks, “Why?” If the “right” thing is the thing that you should do, then saying that you should do the right thing is... unhelpful, to say the least.

Without building any kind of a consensus and establishing an underlying principle to ethical behavior, or at least pointing at the grey areas surrounding most actual ethical issues, that whole avenue of inquiry is narratively bankrupt.

Or maybe I'm just a big jerk.

Asymptotic Advancement

2009-06-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

How fast do you think you could run 100 meters?

Now, I don't know much about Track and Field, but I'm pretty sure you could run 100m in a little over 20 seconds. The world record is just under 10 seconds for men and just over 10 seconds for women.

Again, I don't know much regarding track, but I'm willing to bet that someone capable of matching or exceeding the world record trains tens of thousands of hours more than you or I do. All of that time, all of those thousands of hours of training, leads to cutting the time in half, and I bet the first 6 seconds off that time can be achieved within the first thousand hours.

You see, human skill levels are logarithmic. The return on the investment of time training grows smaller the more you train.

Now imagine your WoW character. If the skill level of your WoW character was logarithmic, a level 80 character would be only marginally better than a level 70 character, despite the fact that it probably took most people longer to go from 70 to 80 than 1 to 40. How many level 10 characters do you think it takes to down a single level 80 character? Maybe an infinite number.

The fact is, in almost all RPGs, the advancement is exactly the opposite: exponential. Experience required to level up increases exponentially, but so does experience gained, so your power level increase to time spent ratio goes up the longer you play.

My hunch is that this is done to give games a wider appeal. The bread and butter of RPGs, at least to some degree, has always been repetition. If you can't fight things in at least a somewhat similar fashion, it's difficult to feel like you've advanced at all, and the feeling of advancement is what RPGs bank on to counteract the somewhat repetitive nature of their play.

As I play through a game, and get more and more accustomed to its play style, I need additional reinforcement from other sources to overcome the diminishing returns of the novelty of the system. In RPGs, the main supplanting reinforcement is the feeling of character advancement (combined with the sometimes heavy reinforcement of unfolding narrative).

In fact, mastery plays a large part in many people's enjoyment of games, (don't worry, I won't throw in one of those tacky blog quizzes about “What kind of gamer are you?”) but there's an important distinction, I think, between games in which your advance through skill mastery alone, and games where you advance through a combination of skill mastery and character advancement. Sure, almost every game has some amount of character advancement: your character is more powerful in Doom when you have the chaingun than when you only had the pistol, but for the most part, any advance you make in that game is based on your own skill level increasing.

Not so with RPGs. Truthfully, I'm not sure I was any “better” at Final Fantasy 7 when I beat it than when I started it. It's not exactly a terribly skill intensive game. In fact, the term “RPG”, has come to describe games in which a character's numerical advancement is a large part of progression through the game, despite the fact that there's absolutely no connection between the terms. In Half Life, you play the role of Gordon Freeman, but that doesn't seem to mean anything anymore.

The term RPG, and the idea of critical hits (as I mentioned in the last post), I think, are just more subtle ways in which very specific gaming tropes get generalized to form a gaming subculture, which is a point of great fascination to me. I'll let you know when I get my degree in cultural anthropology so I can sound like I know what I'm talking about.

World of Roguecraft

2009-06-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

In Secret of Mana, two of your three characters have magic, up to a maximum of 99 magic points at a time. Your offensive caster has an MP absorb spell, but aside from that, the only way to restore your magic points mid-dungeon is to use a Fairy Walnut, which restores 50 MP, and you can only hold a maximum of four.

By limiting the selection of Mana restoring items to one large chunk, the game has rendered it almost pointless to increase your maximum mana above 50. Since your MP caps at 99, you can never use two in a row without wasting some, and given the real time nature of the game, using an item doesn't cost a turn, or similarly penalize you time wise. Your offensive spell caster has an MP absorb spell, so you only use restorative items on your defensive caster, in which every point of MP gained up until 50 is actually worth 5 MP (the original plus four restores), but past 50, every point of MP gained is worth only a single point, to be used and only restored once you sleep at an Inn.

You have no control over your advancement, so this isn't a balance issue, but you can tell from looking at the game that the designers didn't think much about that. Health restoring items come in 100, 250, and “all” versions (out of a max of 999), so why not magic?

“Video Game Design” as a valid field of inquiry is a fairly new phenomenon, and I think design hiccups like the above one from Secret of Mana suggest that it's taken a while to connect the people who were pioneering this new medium with the people who had been doing the same thing on paper for at least a decade before.

Early RPGs (which I count as everything leading up to the release of the PS1), particularly Japanese ones, provide a fascinating window into a large group of people trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of roleplaying games.

For instance, take the idea of critical hits. (Wikipedia article here) The idea of critical hits, as best as I can tell, arose as a way of somewhat mitigating the horrible inaccuracy of the HP system. There's always a chance you'll stab somebody in the heart, causing much more damage than if you stabbed them in the thigh.

According to the Wikipedia article, 1975 was the birth of critical hits in western civilization, which was drastically before the advent of video roleplaying games. Supposedly, the man behind Dragon Warrior, Yuji Horii, cited Ultima among his influences for the gameplay of Dragon Warrior, but even crafting that sentence indicates how much of the early Japanese RPG experience was informed by Western Culture. The Dragonlord from Enix's first Dragon Warrior is most definitely the kind St. George would have been tasked with slaying.

And yet, take the thief class from Final Fantasy. If I recall correctly, he had an increased chance to critically hit, which makes perfect sense to our current gameplaying sensibilities, but actually has no realistic basis. Why should I be more likely to hit a vital organ because I steal things? I understand that there's an association between stealth and assassination, but I imagine that the original Japanese word for the “Thief” in Final Fantasy provided a smoother segue to the upgraded “Ninja” class.

The original “Rogue” (Wikipedia article here) had no such association between thievery and likelihood of striking an internal organ, and yet it's become such a huge part of our gaming culture that nobody bats an eye at the idea that a primary statistic designed to represent your ability to dodge also increases your chance of striking an internal organ, or that there's an entire class in almost every single MMO created based on the idea of the combination of both being sneaky, and critically hitting someone. I certainly don't object, but I think it's occasionally edifying to trace the history of certain gaming tropes, and learn how potentially artificial these associations are.

Well, at least for you guys, I roll combat with my rogue.

Join me for the entire month of June, as I do a series on the tropes of early console and computer RPGs.

A Crash Course in Fast Food Marketing

2009-05-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

I was going to an Arby's for lunch the other day (terrible of me, I know), and I found a sign on the door sternly informing me that the restroom was for customers only, and that this is so they can keep their prices down, by minimizing labor and materials they have to spend on their restroom.

At first glance, this seems like a fine idea. If you're not patronizing the establishment, it seems kind of irresponsible to come in, use their bathroom, then bail entirely.

But at second glance, how much money do you think they spend, on a yearly basis, on people who come in to use the bathroom, but don't buy anything? How many of those people would be deterred by a tersely worded sign on the front door? I would be stunned if they spent more than $20 a year on labor and supplies for a restroom used by people who would be honestly deterred by that sign. Is the $20 they save worth the callous impression that that sign left me with? Probably not. The good will of people who might be put off by that sign is probably worth more than the money they'd spend on the restroom.

But at a third glance, when was the last time you went to a fast food establishment, and honestly took the demeanor of the staff into account? When I go to eat fast food, I go because it'll be quick, and I know exactly what I'll get. Whether or not the cashier is a surly pimply faced teenager doesn't really enter into my mind.

And yet, in my neighborhood, there's a Wendy's that, for one reason or another, constantly attracts interesting and friendly people, from the old lady (now deceased, sadly) who would come by to clean up your table and ask you how your day was, to the dozen or so World War II fighter pilots that get together there on Wednesdays to talk old war stories. That is the only fast food establishment I've ever intentionally chosen to go to for any reason other than convenience or a particular craving, so I can't truthfully say that the callous sign on the front of the Arby's would actually ever deter my business, so maybe it's not a bad idea after all.

Arby's just doesn't have my goodwill. They don't have any ill will on my part, but the Arby's brand is in every way value neutral in my mind. A sign telling me that the restroom is for customers only doesn't really hurt their brand in my head, but a sign saying, “Restrooms open to everyone!” wouldn't exactly engender a meaningful amount of good will either.

The simple fact of the matter is that fast food restaurants don't really make any of their business by having much of a brand. Some people go to Jack in the Box because they have some free floating attachment to the idea of Jack in the Box, but truthfully, most people go because it's either the closest, or they prefer Jack in the Box food to other similar offerings. If you wanted fast food, would you honestly go to another location because your first choice didn't open their bathrooms to people who weren't customers?

Business 101 teaches you that cutting non-essential costs means more revenue, and Marketing 101 teaches you that establishing goodwill towards your brand is worth quite a bit of money, but Marketing 102 teaches you that if you don't have a brand in the first place, half measures probably aren't worth it.

He Loves to Fly

2009-05-12T13:41:00.001-07:00

An instructive example:

In The Simpsons episode “He Loves to Fly and He Do'hs”, probably best known for featuring a guest voice by Stephen Colbert, Homer needs to deliver some bad news to Marge, so he decides to do it aboard a private plane.

When he hires the private plane, the exchange goes something like this:

Pilot: Well, anything for a fellow marine.
Homer (nervously): Semper... uh, fudge!
Pilot: Did you just say “Semper fudge”?
Homer: No, I said the right thing.

This is a mildly amusing exchange, but not that important in the long run, other than it reinforces Homer's bumbling doofus persona that features so heavily into most Simpsons episodes, but later on, aboard the plane, Homer finds the pilot passed out, only waking up long enough to inform Homer that he didn't think he'd be flying today, so he did a bunch of heroin.

Another mildly amusing exchange, except that suddenly and without warning, the dynamic has flipped from Homer being the incompetent one to the pilot being the incompetent one. You have an idea of who this pilot is based on is two lines of dialog, and then a later joke that involves him runs entirely counter to who you think this character is. Because they flipped the clearly established character relationship without ever addressing it, something kind of rings false.

You know that high play you were in where you were an extra, and your drama teacher always told you that it was important that you knew exactly who your character was, and where they were going after they left the stage?

Yeah, turns out this is what happens when you don't do that.

X-Men

2009-05-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

This weekend, against my better judgment, I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie was mediocre, but more than anything else, it got me thinking about my reaction to the previous movie, the 3rd X-men one.

There were two major problems I had with that film. First of all, Magneto, at least in my head, is distinguished because of his amazing plans. Giving prison guards pills to increase the level of iron in their blood (while medically suspect) is the most basic idea in terms of ridiculously circuitous plans that I imagine he might develop.

My memory is a little hazy, but in the most recent instantiation of the X-Men comic series, he mounts a plan to break out of jail that involves building a machine to fool people into thinking mutant powers had gone wild, so that a particularly impressionable youth would assume the blame, Professor X would reach out to this youth, they would get into a conflict with the government over the youth, and in the ensuing completely unrelated jailbreak that the X-Men mount, Magneto manages to escape.

Yes, it's kind of stupid, but it's also kind of awesome.

What was Magneto's plan in the third X-Men movie? Get a whole bunch of mutants together and... I guess just kind of all run at Alcatraz at once? You're serious? It looked awesome, but Velociraptors in Jurassic Park showed more forethought than that.

Also, the idea of the Phoenix is kind of an issue, I think. I don't know the canon well enough to have any opinion about what the Phoenix should be, so that wasn't problematic, but I couldn't help but feel cheated for all the wasted potential there.

If a team of superheroes has amazing powers, and finally finds a threat which their powers simply cannot oppose, they have only one choice to avoid being defeated: Find a new way in which to be heroic.

There was a little bit of that in the third X-men movie. No one could fight Jean Grey as the Phoenix, and only Wolverine was able to kill her because of their previous relationship, but it was portrayed that he was able to get up to her because of his healing powers. If Wolverine saves the day because he has healing powers... who cares? But if Wolverine saves the day because he understands that being a Superhero is more about being heroic than kicking ass, that's a movie I'd see in a heartbeat.

(Oh, and a fun fact for all you X-Men fans out there: X-Men is successful because it's Superheroes + Degrassi. Think about it.)

The Morality of Cutscenes, or Vice Versa

2009-04-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Having gotten back from GDC, and with a number of new things on my plate, there are a lot of things I should be talking about, and I plan a “Reflections on GDC” post in the near future, but until then, I feel obligated to grind out my thoughts on something that's been quite the topic of discussion amongst people in the industry I associate with.

Today topic is: Cutscenes in Games

It seems to be the general opinion floating around in most circles that cutscenes are generally a negative thing to have in games. Kind of like narration in a screenplay, they're thought to represent something that can be used to great effect, but most of the time when you see them, it just represents laziness on behalf of the writer. The thought is that when you are playing a game, you're engaging in some amount of interactivity, and cutscenes take that away from the player, and so are counter productive to the game experience. If you can't tell the story while still allowing the player some measure of control, you're better off writing for movies instead of games. Everybody with me so far?

Personally, I strongly disagree. The idea that the ultimate goal of games is interactivity confuses me. Yes, I understand that it's the salient characteristic of games, and therefore, could be argued their most important one, but art as a whole has as its goal the phenomenological experience of the person beholding it, nothing else matters.

I agree that cut scenes in games that rob the player of control are frequently just kind of a hack solution, but what about a moment in which the precise feeling that you're looking to foster is a lack of control? An appropriately dramatic cutscene is precisely what you want at the moment.

But virtually everyone can agree with that, what I have a strange time swallowing is the idea that for a story to garner a significant amount of emotional involvement, you don't need cutscenes. Everybody I've talked to has been pointing to games like Portal, Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Half-Life 2 as examples of games that tell an engaging story while not relying heavily on the cutscene format.

I feel like the technology just isn't there yet for that to be true. Yes, I loved all of those games, but I think Natalie said it best while I was up in San Mateo for GDC: “I remember playing through Half Life 2, and someone said something that revealed a facet of Gordan Freeman's personality, and I thought, 'Oh, I'm like that? I didn't know!'”

Thinking about this discussion has kind of revealed my vague dissatisfaction with sandbox style RPGs in general. I think it's time that the game industry faces up to a bitter pill: Tabula Rasa characters don't get people personally involved in stories. Period.

If I'm playing through Fallout 3, and I do a bunch of evil things in the beginning of the game, presumably I'm setting myself up for an evil character. For some reason though, Bethesda is afraid to limit your choices later on in the game too heavily, because the idea of having a lot of options open to you is some kind of holy grail that cannot be interfered with by any mere mortal man. If you force me to be evil late in the game because I was evil early in the game, you're robbing me of choices. In this case it's a partial lack of control, and in cutscenes it's a total lack of control, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Again, I'm a little unclear on why this is so bad. Game developers seem to value interactivity over the general quality of the experience.

Because game developers are desperately concerned that I can choose to be evil or good at every possible intersection, the only story that can be crafted around this kind of game's main character is either two stories, one where you're Mother Teresa, and one where you're Hitler (Bioshock, KotOR), or a story that doesn't actually account for your morality in any way other than a footnote (Arcanum, Fallout 3).

Newsflash: by attempting to make a game that appropriately to the morality of your character dynamically, 99% of the time, you're actually making a game that presents a ridiculous parody of actual ethical behavior and consequences.

There's a place for this kind of game, and I enjoy Fallout 3 a ton, to be sure, but if you want to talk plot, give me a call when the technology is there, I'll be in the other room, playing Chrono Trigger on my DS.

(Oh, and for those who haven't heard, you should check here to see a conversation at GDC between myself, Jeff Ward, Corvus Elrod, Darren Torpey, filmed by Darius Kazemi.)

Check the Blueprint

2009-02-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

The mindset in which music is created has always been a large part of what I listen to and what I don't. I don't listen to Hip Hop, but I listen to Kero One. I don't listen to Emo, but I love “I Wish” by Semisonic, and so on. Whether or not the artist has respect for their audience is almost more important, in my mind, than measure of musical ability.

Adjunct to this fact, I think, is that traditional love songs have never appealed to me. I think “Our House”, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young is a sweeter love song than anything a boy band ever produced:

Our house
Is a very very very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy 'cause of you

This isn't a new sentiment, but it's a slight variations on what you see in the traditional “You're the light of my life”, “I'll give you the moon and the stars”, “We were made for each other” fare that you see, which I've become largely inured to the effect of. Compare the above quote from “Our House” to Rod Stewart's “Have I Told You Lately”:

You fill my heart with gladness
Take away all my sadness
Ease my troubles, that's what you do

They say very similar things, but which one is more effective? I think the comparison is instructive.

Personal opinion varies, as it must, but I think “Our House” feels more genuine. Because it doesn't repeat the same sentiments in the same way, it gives the impression that the songwriter put more thought into its creation, and because it hasn't been repeated endlessly, it remains more enduring. (Rod Stewart, of course, gets a huge amount of credit for being on the first wave of performing his particular brand of love songs, but I think their time has passed for the moment)

Likewise, the version of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from the movie is, I think, a more interesting love song (despite being only about two minutes long) than Elton John's commercial release, because it contains the lines:

He's holding back, he's hiding
But what, I can't decide
Why won't he be the king I know he is?
The king I see inside

Obviously this couldn't make for a commercial release, because it's so inextricably tied to the plot of the movie, but this is a sentiment that I simply don't see in commercial love songs. It's implied that Nala loves Simba because she sees the king inside him. As Natalie would no doubt say, it makes any man who stops and thinks about it, say to himself, “Does my significant other see a king inside me?” Am I of regal bearing? Do I command respect? Am I benevolent to those both above and below me? Is the hallmark of my life the grace of the divine?*

All introspection aside, this one simple concept has all of these associations. I've already diatribed about the power of archetypes, and “The Lion King”, being basically a Joseph Campbell cookie cutter story, has no shortage of them, but because it was animated beautifully, and cast with lions rather than a generic medieval kingdom, it remains significantly more enduring.

There are no more new stories. The only thing that remains is to tell them in new ways.

*I use the term “King” to be in direct reference to the song, and because that is the way that Natalie is most apt to talk about it. All of these are unisex concepts, to be sure.

2009-02-05T14:34:00.000-08:00

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

I guess I need this
Special Glyph called Dominus
I just use lasers

Fallout 3

Please disarm this bomb
If you do, you get a house
To store your cola

You can blow up towns
But before you do, make sure
You take all their stuff

Gears of War 2

Kill this giant worm
By sawing its arteries
Before blood drowns you

Braid

Tim and the Princess
Maybe she's his mother, but
Maybe just a bomb

Galaxy Fight

Galaxy Fight makes
Me hate the game and myself
Outside, a bird chirps

Okami

Calligraphy Dog!
Who's really a sun goddess
Who goes into... space?

Secret of Mana

Go Royal Jelly
But you can only hold four
What the shit is that?

(Don't know Galaxy Fight? Look here)

"Inspirational" Games

2009-01-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

So, I've recently noted that iTunes categorizes all music by overtly Christian artists as “Inspirational”, and sheer inaccuracy of that description has gotten me thinking.

There are very few overtly Christian artists that I listen to on my own time, because I've never been particularly taken with that style of music, but even a rudimentary examination of motives will show that most “Inspirational” music is music for a worship service, so of course it's a little repetitive, and musically simple, it's designed to be sung along to from the get-go.

Except, “Inspirational” is very clearly a genre of music. Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band (look up “Banjo Boy”, it's amazing) are an overtly Christian band, but they're folk and bluegrass, not “Inspirational”.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that when you (or I, for that matter) hear about “Christian Games”, you probably think of this:

I think the picture says it all.

And yet, what about games that aren't hamfisted? When was the last time you played a game that was about generally Christian worldviews that wasn't awful? Or, even worse, when was the last time you played a game about Christian worldviews at all? The only thing I've ever seen is games that are supposed to represent events of the bible, and make them “fun”. There's a complete gameplay-narrative disconnect.

And yet, a game about the power of forgiveness, the tendency of mankind to drop the ball on their own, and the magnitude of a sacrifice of one person of amazing virtue (all Christian themes, though not exclusively so) could be amazing, as long as whoever is making it realizes it doesn't need to be a first person shooter where David travels through bible stories, and upgrades his sling stones with faith points. It's rather difficult to imbue mechanics with narrative significance (mechanics in this case referring to the most basic building blocks of a game, in the MDA sense, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can find more information here), but the game world in which you operate in can abide by certain rules consistent with a Christian worldview.

At the moment, the only Christian principle Super 3D Noah's Ark reinforces is that if feed animals, they don't bite you to death. That's... uh, good... I guess?

Chicanery

2009-01-12T23:15:00.000-08:00

Of the wowhead sort:

http://www.wowhead.com/?blog=67173

Playing Columbine

2009-01-11T16:54:00.000-08:00

So, just the other day, I saw a documentary called “Playing Columbine”, about Danny Ledonne's “Super Columbine Massacre RPG!”.

Yeah, if you haven't heard of it before, I know what you're thinking. The point of the documentary, also created by Danny Ledonne, is to draw attention to the controversy surrounding the game, most especially its last-minute dump from Slamdance's Guerrilla Gamemaker competition, despite protests from the game competition jury, but more than that, the documentary is about pointing at the role of games as art and the ability (or inability) of violent video games to influence violent behavior.

An important Disclaimer before we get too far:
I have not played this game. It looks like I might need to, but I haven't yet played it, and anything I say about it is gleaned from first hand accounts of people that have, combined with internet research and said documentary. The website for the game can be found at http://www.columbinegame.com/

The point of the game, well, I'll just quote a bit from the “Artist's Statement” found on the website:

“Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, through their furious words and malevolent actions, can be understood as the canaries in the mine—foretelling of an 'apocalypse soon' for those remaining to ponder their deeds. With ‘Super Columbine Massacre RPG!,’ I present to you one of the darkest days in modern history and ask, 'Are we willing to look in the mirror?'”

Whether or not the game accomplishes this is unclear (certainly for me, having never played it), but the amount of controversy regarding it certainly proves it struck some kind of a nerve, and virtually all mainstream media outlets that caught a whiff of it didn't help.

The detractors of the project generally fall into two parties: The people who feel that allowing a person to participate in recreating the tragedy is reprehensible (the player does, in fact, take on the role of Harris and Klebold), and people who have latched onto this as evidence of the negative impact of violent video games.

To the argument that violent video games encourage violent behavior, I merely need to point out that violent crime has been on a drastic decline in recent years. Small scale cause-and-effect studies don't do much for your cause when correlational evidence is stacked so high against you. Furthermore, playing violent video games, it's been shown, does encourage violent behavior, but as “Playing Columbine” insists, so does watching violent movies and reading violent books. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, even shows that reading polite words causes polite behavior. No more needs to be said about that topic.

(As much as no more needs to be said, have you ever noticed that Video Games are blasted for desensitizing people to violence, and yet, video games that are more graphic, represent violence in a more physically accurate form, are also attacked? Seems a little disingenuous...)

Regarding the responsibility of creating a game that represents the events of Columbine in excruciating detail, I direct your attention to “Elephant” the 2003 Gus Van Sant film about a school shooting. It, too, weathered a great deal of criticism, but has been almost universally critically acclaimed, particularly for its willingness to tackle generally taboo issues. (The name “Elephant” refers to the fact that no one wants to acknowledge the existence of the real problem) The same goes for “Bowling for Columbine” and “Zero Day”. The idea that a game somehow can't explore these themes, if done with artistic responsibility and respect for those involved, is laughable to me.

This is probably a futile endeavor on my part, because I imagine no one who reads this blog legitimately believes that games simply cannot be agents of social change, but I'm tempted to grind it out anyway.

No one would doubt that movies can be agents for social change, and the one quality that games have different from movies is interactivity. Graphics and sound have since become a non-issue. So, how interactive does something have to be to be called a game? Pressing “Play” on your DVD menu doesn't turn “The Dark Knight” into a game. Having to press “Play” every 44 minutes while watching the first season of 24 on DVD doesn't make it a game. You remember those old arcade games, where it was all animated and you only had one button, but you had to hit it at the right time to avoid dying? That's clearly a game, and it's almost entirely you watching things, and there's only one button.

But that's kind of a glib assessment. When you press the button, it has an effect on the course of the story in arcade games, while once the story starts in a movie, the author has complete control, right?

Well... if I go and see a movie, I decide when I'm gonna see the movie, right? If I buy it on DVD, I have control over when I press the button, I have control over how to interpret things, I have control over whether or not I want to keep watching, I have control over whether or not I have to pause it to go take a whiz. I've certainly heard more than one convincing interpretation of “Mulholland Dr.”, but because the person can only ever have a set experience, it can be “art”?

Well, no, that doesn't work either. The demeanor of the film changes significantly if you don't see the cowboy the second time, which is entirely under the control of the viewer. You can't absorb all of the information in one go, and you have to choose what you pay attention to, but that sounds like choices you make in a game. I haven't heard an argument that doesn't boil down to “Games usually aren't artistic, so they can't be artistic”. Even Roger Ebert's critique of games as art only thinly veils his contempt for the average gamer:

“But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

But nevertheless, most sensible cultured gamers admit that this critique is not undeserved. Most people don't think of games as art because there are virtually no artistic games.

(It's worth noting that that's why I enjoyed Xenogears so much. It was the first game I remember playing that seemed to have a cinematic sensibility about it. The fully rotatable 3d environments allowed the camera to move during even mundane scenes long before graphics in consoles reached the point of allowing for more than rudimentary cinematography)

And more than artistic purpose, political activism and social responsibility have been largely absent from game creation. Edutainment is there, but none of it is that good. What interests me most about this, however, is the cycle that's emerged about older generations being threatened by the newest development in youth culture. I think the parallel is obvious here: Swing, Rock, Movies in the first place, Grunge, and now it looks like videogames. Are cultural/artistic revolutions occurring with just enough time between them that the older generations forget about when they were the edgy revolutionaries being yelled at by their parents about how they were all going to end up drug addicted rapists? Are the people fighting to have video games, even violent ones, treated as a legitimate artistic medium going to learn their lesson, and not rail against their children about how this time, unlike all the other times, the world is really going to hell in a handbasket?

Eh, it's probably more likely that I'll be a 70 year old man, and filmmaking will have turned into nothing but a vehicle to produce additional “Saw” films, and I'll be yelling at my grandkids about how all they ever do is watch hamfistedly moralizing torture pornography.

I can't wait. =/

The website for Ledonne's film can be found at: http://www.playingcolumbine.com/

Buck Rogers in the 20th Century

2009-01-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of work on Buck Rogers lately, reading old Canon, talking about what the appeal is, trying to figure out what, if any, Internet presence is commanded by the name “Buck Rogers”.

Did you know that the original Buck Rogers from the 1920's was the first story to run with the “Man from modern day is frozen in time, wakes up X years in the future”? Buck Rogers was from the modern day, but wakes up in the 25th century after various accidents (depending on the instantiation of the story you're looking at) leave him in suspended animation.

Here's a valuable lesson for writers out there that I learned just recently:

If Buck Rogers is supposed to be a hero, and he is, believe you me, it helps to have a quality that makes him exceptional. Well, that's easy, he's from the 20th century (or possibly the 21st century, I suppose) and he's in the future, that makes him exceptional, but it's just not enough. If I got transported into the 25th century, I would flip the fuck out. Barring some sort of huge catastrophe (which the Buck Rogers universe doesn't provide for) human beings in the 25th century should be better at doing just about everything. I don't know about physical fitness, but more advanced transportation, more advanced weaponry, fewer diseases and genetic defects (gennies, genetically engineered humans, are a staple of the universe), and so forth. Why would a 20th century pilot be able to function meaningfully in this world at all, let alone become a hero and save the day?

The answer is that the 25th century world must have lost something that Buck Rogers, being a hotshot pilot from the 20th century, still has. It can be almost anything, but (and I know this sounds so obvious as to be self-evident, but you'd be surprised) Buck needs, in order to be a hero, some quality that no one else has.

It's kind of a pre-req to being a hero at all, really. I harp on thematic consistency too much as it is, but unless you can answer the question of “what is the singular quality that makes this hero special?”, you're not really telling a story about a hero. You don't need to tell a story about a hero, to be sure, but... might as well know what you've got, right?

Shiva's Consort

2008-12-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a little Christmas gift for everyone:

In VS Ramachandran's books A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness and Phantoms in the Brain, he attempts to begin to tackle the question of the neurological basis of art. A tall order indeed...

One of the subjects he suggests is called “Peak Shift”. A caricature is created by overplaying everything that is unique about someone's face, and downplaying everything that is not. A caricature of Richard Nixon has a huge nose and jowls, but his chin and eyes are downplayed, while a Buster Keaton caricature would have huge eyes.

Our emotional or instinctive reaction to something that we see is based on the recognition of a small number of salient characteristics. When those characteristics that we look for (consciously or not) are exaggerated, it looks more and more like the thing that we look for, even to the point where a caricature of Richard Nixon can be said to look more like Nixon than he does.

Permit me, if you will, an extended example: The basis of this concept in Ramachandran's book started with an experiment with a bird that, when it hatched, identified its mother by a red spot on its yellow beak. It was quickly discovered that the spot on the beak was the salient characteristic that the bird was looking for. It would respond equally to a disembodied fake beak as it would to an actual bird. In fact, the experimenter was able to create a short yellow stick with three red stripes on it that, in a sense, looked more like a beak than an actual beak. It had the salient characteristic the baby bird was looking for, “yellow thing with some red stuff on the end”, but it had no other characteristics to distract from that, so the birds went nuts over it. He had created, in Ramachandran's words, a “super beak”.

This applies to human endeavors as well. Again, using Ramachandran's examples, the Hindu goddess Parvati:

Parvati, Shiva's consort, is modeled to be the epitome of all things feminine. She has a small waist, huge breasts, wide hips, all the stereotypically feminine physical qualities taken to a large degree. Supposedly, when confronted with statues like this, most Victorian westerners complained that it was primitive and worthless because it didn't look like a real person. What they didn't realize is that the creator had, consciously or unconsciously, emphasized the salient qualities of the character (femininity, sensuality, poise and so forth) and tried to abstract away everything that is common to the larger category (the human form), but not a part of the specific form they were creating. The end result is, as Ramachandran puts it, “one anatomically incorrect but very sexy goddess”.

If you look at the anime style of drawing, you have, generally, very large eyes, mouths that vary in size hugely, and small/downplayed noses. The keys to emotional expression (mouth, eyes, eyebrows) are overplayed, and the less expressive features of faces (noses, chins) are minimized. Anime characters aren't supposed to look realistic, they're caricatures designed for maximum expression of emotion.

This concept, I submit, applies to narrative as well. If I want to write a story about a character who is particularly brave, I will write a story in which that character does things that show bravery. If in the story, my character spends time doing things like eating, shopping, using the bathroom, and so forth, it diminishes the effect of the story.

This is a pretty simple lesson to learn as a writer. In any given story you write, you need to go through every single event, and ask “What purpose does this serve in shaping the overall narrative?” If you don't have a good answer, it needs to go.

Even beyond that, though, Western storytelling, cinema in particular, has a long love affair with movies in which your enjoyment of the film hinges almost exclusively on understanding precisely what is going on. Memento, The Prestige, The Usual Suspects, Murder on the Orient Express... even the entire first season of Lost is predicated on cascading character (learning a new piece of information about a character which makes you reevaluate all your previously acquired information). Even beyond that,

Here's where it gets interesting, however. Take “Kino's Journey”, a 2003 anime series based on a short series of Japanese novellas by Keiichi Sigsawa, and consists of 13 episodes, each detailing their own independent story, designed to raise serious metaphysical and ethical questions. In the second episode, the main character helps a team of people stranded in the snow, and ponders the ethics of hunting rabbits to save the traders who are snowed in, only to discover in the end that the traders are actually slavers. The show has no interest in placing this story as part of a larger world, or convincing you that these characters are real people with real problems. The show is only interested in posing the ethical question of taking a creature's life to preserve the life of another creature, so it doesn't go into things like the names of the slavers, and it only focuses on their humanity in as much as it serves to make the ethical dilemma more engaging.

This kind of convention is rampant in anime in particular. One of the reasons Neon Genesis Evangelion is so enduring is that all of the robots doing their thing is, as Stephen Notely puts it, “a psychological puppet show”. As tongue-in-cheek as the cartoon is, the destroying is largely incidental. Figuring out what's going on, because it's less important than the emotional angle of the show, is downplayed. The “salient characteristic” (to possibly coin a term) is the study in dysfunctional personalities, particularly Shinji, Asuka, and Misato. Everything that isn't in service of that is absent or minimized, which leads to the strong emotional reactions that many people have to the show.

It's important to note that this is slightly different from the “Everything that isn't in service of your story needs to be cut” axiom. In Chinatown, a movie widely praised for its screenplay, everything that happens happens for a reason, but understanding what happens is at least as important, if not more important that how it makes you feel. Or, more accurately, feeling the way that the filmmaker wants you to feel is predicated on a full understanding of the events of the film.

To give another example, Revolutionary Girl Utena, another anime, love it or hate it, will frequently feature scenes with characters talking, with action going on in the background that you obviously know is not actually occuring, (baseball games on balconies, trains running through classrooms, etc.) but assist you in interpreting the things being said by the characters. You are very clearly coached on how to feel about the conversation, and things not in service of the feel of the conversation (where the characters are) are dropped in favor of further emphasis on the emotional content of the scene.

But, you ask, isn't the heart of good cinematography to reinforce the message of the film with every available outlet? Well, yes. However, there's a limit to that that the japanese anime style frequently leaps over entirely. You can have an area and weather that reinforces the general feeling of a conversation, but it's kind of difficult to cram an entire conversations worth of changing opinions, facts, and alliances into a weather formation, which is suddenly possible when you have a baseball game going on amongst the characters.

Now, please understand, this is not about a value judgment. Is Michelangelo's David “better” than the aforementioned statue of Parvati? It's a nonsense question, but Michelangelo's David is a made in the Greek representational mindset, while the Parvati is not, but it seems like a valuable idea to stop and point out the differences between the representational and the intuitive mindset when it comes to both art and narrative. More on this later.

Children's Movies

2008-12-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

Just earlier today, I was looking through an old copy of Entertainment Weekly, and inside was a review of the Clone Wars movie, which had just come out at the time. The positive elements of it were listed as that while the plot was kind of dumb, and the characters were described as... I believe "bombastic" was the word, the reviewers kids loved it, and they didn't know any children who saw it and didn't. I mean, it was just a kids movie, right?

I'd just like to say "Thanks, PIXAR, for proving once and for all that 'It's just a kids movie' just isn't good enough."

Check it

2008-12-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

And by "it", I mean the side bar, for my most recent WoWhead post.

Gaming Brands cont.

2008-12-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

Question: How many of you have seen the Gametap commercials on Adult Swim?

Do these commercials piss you off too?

Okay, maybe that's a little strong for it, but let's face it, 90% of ad agencies just don't “get” video games. What do I mean by “getting” video games?

Example: The Bubble Bobble commercial which many of you may have seen. Come on people! Everyone under 30 knows that the dragons in Bubble Bobble are going to the Cave of Monsters to rescue their girlfriends, not to eat things! Or look at the Deus Ex commercial too. Whoever wrote the copy for that clearly didn't know very much about the game. Anything they say could go for 70% of video games set in the future ever.

I'm well aware that “copywriters not knowing much about the product they need to write copy for” is not a new practice, and it's not limited to video games, but imagine this for a moment:

Instead of their current Bubble Bobble commercial, imagine if you just had a twenty-something guy in a cubicle, wearing a white, short sleeved button down shirt with a tie, hunched over, typing away at a computer, looking bored. The sounds of a modern office buzz around him. Phone rings, people talking, fax machines running, and just barely audible in the background is the Bubble Bobble music. The guy keeps plugging away at his computer, seemingly unaware, as the music slowly gets louder and louder. After 12 seconds or so, the guy has not reacted in any way to the music, and it's gotten quite loud by now, at which point the guy looks up, a little away from the camera, smiles, then nods knowingly. Immediately cut to the Gametap logo and slogan.

I'm not an ad exec, I'm not a copywriter, and I don't have too much of a directorial eye, but I swear, that commercial would kill. Why would it kill? Because everyone who played too much Bubble Bobble as a kid has incredibly fond memories of that music. I know this because I was one of those kids.

Frankly, I'm just calling out Gametap for being clueless, at least they're not patronizing. Penny Arcade already took care of that one better than I ever could.

Okay, how many of you have seen the WoW “What's your game?” commercials? These commercials, I feel, “get it”. As Malgayne has pointed out in his wowhead blog about them, in one fell swoop, they hit the Adult Swim sense of humor by picking a format and spokespeople ripe for parody, but also hit on popular enough spokespeople to scratch the itch for validation most gamers still have. I don't know who does Blizzard's ads, but either the agency themselves get it, or somebody at Blizzard is making them get it.

Gaming Brands

2008-12-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

I've been talking about core fantasies and branding a fair amount recently (when I'm not riffing on terrible games), but I think it represents a significant failure in my logic that I haven't spent more time talking about what the connection is here to games. Afterall, Bethesda isn't a brand, it's a company. A good test to see if something is a brand, and therefore has a core fantasy (not all things with core fantasies are brands, but all brands have a core fantasy) is to ask “If I wore a shirt with their logo on it, what would I be saying about myself?” If the message is unclear or non-existent, then either it's not a brand, or it's a poorly managed one.

If I wear a shirt that says “Secret of Mana”, I'm saying... I guess that I like Secret of Mana? I'm not really saying anything else, certainly not compared to the classic Harley Davidson example, or even something as mundane as In'n'Out: In'n'Out is all about the retro feel, and the quality of the good old days. Harley Davidson makes a much clearer statement, and therefore has a much clearer fantasy associated with it, but we can all agree that Squareenix or Blizzard don't have a core fantasy to speak of.

So what if a game company wanted to make themselves a brand? In order to do that, they would need to stand for something more than just great games. If I founded a company that made consistently great games (companies that could be brands without a consistently high level of quality are beyond the pale of this discussion) that also consistently promoted social reform, I'd have a brand on my hands. If you wear a hat with this company's logo on it, you'd be saying, “I'm a gamer with a social conscience”.

When I was first thinking about this, it occurred to me that part of the lifeblood of the game industry is the variety of experiences it can deliver. Bethesda does sandbox RPGs, Blizzard used to stand for a great RTS, Squareenix is RPGs, but within these categories, there's a huge amount of variation, not to mention a huge variety of catagories. On the opposite hand, part of building a recognizable brand is to specialize as much as possible, and deliver the same experience as much as possible. This seemed, at first glance, kind of at odds with the game industry. If you keep making the same game over and over again, that's a recipe for failure, but can you make a bunch of games with varied particulars that deliver on the same feeling over and over again? And more importantly, if you make them, will they continue to be fun/entertaining/edifying?

The is answer is “Of course you can”, and I think Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki are the perfect example. Studio Ghibli in general, but Miyazaki in particular, deliver on the same themes and feeling over and over again. Every single one of Miyazaki's movies (and yes, I've seen them all) are about the essential goodness of mankind, the awe-inspiring complexity of nature, and the magical innocence of childhood. Studio Ghibli isn't a brand because no one in the western world is selling it as such (can't speak to Japan), but it has all of the important characteristics, and movies that meet a high standard of quality and all stand for virtually the same thing are clearly all you need to be successful. So why not games?

Next: Why Gaming Brands Suck

More Wowhead Chicanery

2008-11-25T23:22:00.000-08:00

http://www.wowhead.com/?blog=55695

See you folks on the flipside.

But she has ICE powers...!

2008-11-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

As much as it pains me to jump on the bandwagon, Chrono Trigger has got to be my favorite game of all time.

The game's strongest suit is that it's incredibly tight. It's really short, but you get the feeling it's so short because they cut as much of the unnecessary material as possible. The game is much shorter (in fact, it can be beaten in less than 15 hours, I've done it), but, despite getting less game time for your dollar (compared to, say, Disgaea), the experience of playing the game is more enjoyable. At this point it becomes impossible to translate into dollar-to-enjoyment-ratio, but that's not really a concern of mine.

As I already said, the best part of Chrono Trigger is that everything you do is in service of the main plot. As I mentioned in my extended review of Breath of Fire 2, the part that stopped me on that game was the moment at which I said, “What am I doing?” and didn't have a good answer. At every step of the game in Chrono Trigger, it's fairly obvious how what you do next will contribute to stopping the apocalypse. Even when you have to find the dreamstone, which amounts to pretty much just a fetch quest, you end up fleshing out the main plot in the meantime, not to mention meeting another party member.

This brings me to the other big plus about Chrono Trigger. There are six additional party members, all with their own separate backstory, but all of the backstories (Robo is a little iffy, I admit) tie into the main story directly. Barrett from FF7 has an interesting little story behind him, about his town and Dyne and Shinra moving in, but aside from the fact that it involves Shinra being evil, you could cut all of those events from the game, and it wouldn't change the main story at all. If you cut Ayla and the Reptites from Chrono Trigger, you'd have no explanation for how Lavos showed up, if you cut Frog, you'd end up cutting most of Magus and the Masamune, which would leave you without a connection to Zeal.

Because the game is so short, there's very little room for rambling, and most important plot developments double up as an important moment for a character as well. Curiously enough, if they had split everything up, making the game much longer, I think my total enjoyment of the game (and therefore enjoyment per hour and enjoyment per dollar) would be drastically less.

This is precisely what the problem with Chrono Cross was, I think. Virtually nothing you did seemed to be directly in service of the main plot. I'm trying to find this artifact, and then eventually fight Lavos again, so... First I'm going to run around the island looking for parts of a clown skeleton, then rig a casino on a ship, and finally stage a concert for ghosts.

Sigh... at least the music was good.

The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem

2008-11-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

Just so we're clear: Daft Punk is awesome. Furthermore, Interstella 5555 is particularly awesome. First of all, (explaining my jump to this from “Moonwalker”) music videos that tell stories are awesome, and more involved stories are more awesome than less involved stories.

Interstella 5555 is an album long music video created for Daft Punk's “Discovery”. It tells the story of a band from another planet, who are kidnapped by an evil sorcerer turned record producer, who markets the band to human audiences via mind control devices planted in the band members, eventually using their energy (and gold record award-ish things) for some sort of amorphous nefarious purpose. Eventually, a member of their original race receives the distress signal, crash lands on earth, and saves the band. Their true identities revealed to humanity, they're hugely popular anyway, and end up salvaging the hero's ship (who was unfortunately slain during the rescue) to return to their home planet, establishing positive interstellar relations on the basis of kick-ass house grooves.

This plot is ridiculous, I know this, but everyone I know (myself included) loves this movie. It's not good or interesting enough by itself to be worth watching if you dislike Daft Punk's music, but as I hinted at before, music and story have a magic synergy that shortcuts the logical processing part of our brains. As I said, this plot is completely ridiculous. I have a lot of difficulty imagining a movie, game, or book that featured a plot like this that I wouldn't immediately laugh at, and yet, because I'm rockin' out in the meantime to Daft Punk, I swallow this stuff hook line and sinker, and so, I bet, would you.

BA-AUU! (Part 2)

2008-11-19T14:36:00.000-08:00

I find it interesting that I'm so prone to going off on tangents about the nature of branding, despite its (at best) tangential relationship to storytelling. Perhaps that's something that can be changed...

Yesterday, Carol mentioned that maybe Michael Jackson's magic powers (or the suggestion of) was one of the things that made young boys part of his audience. I certainly wished I had magic powers when I was a little kid. All that being said though, I don't feel like I can speculate too much on exactly what Michael Jackson's core fantasy is (or at least the core fantasy of “Moonwalker”) without seeing “Moonwalker”, which I haven't done since I was about 6. Still though, we can look at a couple of aspects of it.

First of all, his current condition aside, Michael Jackson is a good singer and an amazing dancer. Without some amount of talent to begin with (all comments about the cult of celebrity aside), it's difficult, if not impossible to become a huge success as an entertainer, and while it's not exactly a one to one correlation, more talent helps.

Second, I think you need to pick an audience that you can actually reach, and nail it. Michael Jackson was less overtly sexual than Prince, so generally given the thumbs up by mothers with teenage daughters, but still “dreamy” enough to be a teen idol. Likewise, whoever concocted the “Moonwalker” magic powers thing delivered on the younger male audience.

Third, I wouldn't say you need to do something nobody's done before, most pop stars, huge sensations or not, don't, but I certainly think it helped Michael Jackson. Is the fact that the movie was named “Moonwalker” not clear enough?

Still though, all of these things make you a pop sensation, not necessarily a larger than life brand. Not only did Michael Jackson start making that jump when he was sold as having quasi-mystical powers, but someone hinted at something very insightful in a comment about Core Fantasies to me a long time ago. Commercials are the most effective when they contain a mini-narrative. My hunch tells me that the reason why people connect with mini-narratives in commercials is the same reason why people connect with anything even vaguely narrative in form.

Next, Music and Narrative: What Makes Interstella 5555 Great.

BA-AUU!

2008-11-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

Just... wow.

I could talk about the specifics of this game, or the story or... lots of things, but more than that, I'm curious about the jump from musician to game. There are a few others worth mentioning (Aerosmith and “Revolution X”, the hilariously terrible Journey arcade game), but none stand out in my mind as much as the Moonwalker games (there was an arcade version, in addition to the Genesis one).

The question that jumps out at me here is: “Why did Michael Jackson inspire a game, and plenty of other equally talented musicians and performers didn't?” Plenty of musicians have inspired movies, self-indulgent ones at that, and I have the vague childhood impression of “Moonwalker” being somehow more legitimate than anything that's come out since, but in all likelyhood, that's because I was 3 when it did. I'm aware of how ridiculous it is, I assure you.

Even given that, though, Moonwalker is just a game about Michael Jackson. Someone was able to make a Michael Jackson game (which was a decent enough game, not great), but nobody would be able to make a Prince game, or a Bruce Springsteen game, or a John Mayer game. They're all exceptional performers and exceptional musicians (as Michael Jackson was), but they're missing some quality that Michael Jackson had.

For your approval, ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you the Michael Jackson Moonwalker Intro. You know, the one where you see his shoes walking in the spotlight, and they start dropping little sparkles. He does a little twirl, and goes up on his toes? Remember that?

No? Well, how about now? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Quite simply, I think he was able to make this jump because someone on his PR team came up with the brilliant idea to sell him as if he had magic powers. By tapping into the supernatural, he becomes a larger than life figure, and (brace yourself) begins to stand for something larger than just himself. That's what separates a product from a brand. To repeat a tired example: Canada Dry is a soda. Mountain Dew is a lifestyle. Bono is a performer. Michael Jackson is... something else.

The question, of course, is “What?” More on that tomorrow.

World of Explosioncraft

2008-11-17T11:36:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, I'd like to attribute my recent absence to some sort of staggering financial success and critical acclaim, but no, I might just be a lazy jerk.

On the bright side, I can now be found occasionally writing for the good folks at www.wowhead.com

My introductory post can be found here.

At Least My Mom Thinks I'm Funny...

2008-11-13T14:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay, I've got a joke for you. You wanna hear a good joke? Okay, here it is:

Electro-Cop

Seriously, I've been trying to keep this to games that were important in my childhood because they were really good. Even Breath of Fire II, despite it's huge problems, was a big influence on my childhood.

Sadly, so was Electro-Cop, uh, well... kind of. I didn't realize it until recently, but this game was terrible. I could explain what it had going for it, or what it did wrong, but really, everything about this game reduces down to one simple aspect of the game.

As you travel around the building that the game takes place in, you run into a number of locked doors. Doors are locked with a four number password, so there's no chance of you guessing them. If you want to unlock a door, you can run an icebreaker program, which will (fairly quickly) run through every possible combination of numbers, eventually stumbling onto the password and unlocking the door.

I know what you're thinking, if you could do this for every door, what's the point of searching out the passwords in the first place? Get this: There are no passwords. You cannot ever get the password for any door in that game ever. Why do they give you the option to input the password manually? You will never use it. Once you've opened a door, it stays open, and the passwords are generated randomly each game, so you can't use them more than once. The end result is: you have to use the ice breaker program on every door in the entire game.

Since running through all ten thousand possible combinations takes a while, the game gives you small mini-games to play while you're waiting. You can solve a 3x3 slide puzzle, or play a bastardized version of asteroids of break out. Cracking the password takes two to three minutes each, and virtually every door in the entire game is locked. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that in any given game of electro-cop, you spend 75% of your time playing smaller, shittier games!

I know I say this a lot, but who could have possibly given that the thumbs up?! It boggles the mind that someone was able to assemble an entire production team of people who do nothing but play video games developed in the early 70s.

Well guess what, it gets better. If you're lucky enough to solve the slide puzzle, beat all three levels of break out (there are only three levels, yes), or destroy all the asteroids, the game says, “You won. Big deal.” and then starts you over. The game makes fun of you for playing it! Electro-Cop's audacity is... boggling.

It's like the Emperor's New Clothes got condensed into a cartridge for the Atari Lynx, and they're trying to see how much time you have to sink into the game before you realize the game sucks and the makers want to hurt you personally. It's like Andy Kaufman hauled himself out of his grave to make a game, just so you couldn't quite decide for sure if he was making a game, or just attempting to damage people emotionally in an obnoxious piece of performance art. As for me, I choose the latter.

A Wizard has Turned You Into a Whale

2008-11-12T22:33:00.000-08:00

After the opening, which we've heard so much about, Breath of Fire 2 drops you in a town, with you and your friend Bow trying to find work. You end up doing a number of odd jobs as mercenaries, before eventually traveling out to a town where a gladiatorial competition is being held, where you unearth an attempt to fix the fights. Right about here, the game just kind of... breaks down. One of the good organizational parties behind the fights gives some speech, aided by your characters, realizing that some sort of black tide is growing, because you fought a bunch of demons in various places, which he may or may not relate to some ancient prophecy.

Personally, I think this sucks as much as it sounds like it sucks. It gives me the impression that somebody came up with the general overlay of demons coming back, dragons being fated to battle them, your main character being a dragon, and so forth, and then came up with the opening, but kind of fell asleep at the wheel for connecting the dots.

Okay, reader poll: That was the best metaphor ever: (Y/Y)

Seriously though, I remember finally putting the game down for good when I was in a cave below a town, trying to kill a fish that was causing earthquakes, when I stopped and thought “Why the hell am I doing this?” I mean, I was doing it cause Ryu is a generally nice guy who doesn't turn down people who need saving from earthquake fish, but for the life of me, I couldn't see why it mattered for the main plot. I guess earthquake fish messing up towns is also part of that amorphous black tide, but I felt like I had sunk nigh onto ten hours into that game, and still had no idea what I should be doing or where I should be going in the long run. I've pushed through moments like that before in games, but every time a player thinks that, I'd say it represents a significant failure on the part of the writers.

I'll be picking up on that one early December. Back to our regularly scheduled program.

Dreams and Reality

2008-11-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

So, I never actually beat Breath of Fire 2, but nevertheless, the opening remains high on my list of best game openings.

(The scrolling text part of the opening can be found here)

I'm not sure there's much I can say about the “piques your curiosity” angle. Anybody who's ever played Breath of Fire knows that your main character has to be a dragon, so the “you have dreams about your dead mother when you sleep near the dragon” is very unlikely to go anywhere other than “This dragon is your mother, or at least a blood relative”. However, it's worth noting that when your character does actually take a nap, you get a brief flash of a reptilian eye, and then you wake up in the village where no one recognizes you. It shows a decent amount of subtlety (something usually missing from games) to not show the dream, or even answer the question of whether or not you dreamed about your mother. Likewise, I don't know if some explanation is provided later on in the game (I haven't beaten it, remember?), but for the moment, nothing is offered in terms of explanation for why no one recognizes you, and because your character doesn't speak, you don't make any big protestation of “Woah, where am I? Why doesn't anyone recognize me?” You might find out later what's going on, but for the moment it's not important, because you've absorbed the information of everything that's happened so far.

Regarding the text of the written opening: the writing is fine, nothing to elevate it particularly high or sink it particularly low, but I'm particularly struck by two things. First, the demon that kills you doesn't appear to have any malice, suggesting that it's more out to force you to embrace your destiny than just tear you a new one, which was a nice touch, back in the 90's when it wasn't so common. Second, the fact that the text ends with how reality fades away and the dream takes shape, only to dump you at the title screen, and then the main game. Much like Godot and His Mask, you have no idea what the reality of the situation is, but it's not important. It's very possible (I'd even say I hope that it's the case) that the entire game is, in fact, a dream about your mother that you had from closing your eyes near the sleeping dragon.

And yet, I never beat the game. Tomorrow: Why?

Curse You, Dr. Wily!

2008-11-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, so does this box art make anyone else think of the original American Mega Man 2 box art? Way too muscled and old and scary?

I'll just leave it at that...

The absolute best part of Breath of Fire II, in my experience, is the opening. You begin in a small village with your sister and father, and have to search for your sister, who's gone missing. You find her at the base of a mountain on the outskirts of town, being watched over by a sleeping dragon. She informs you when she sleeps near the dragon, she dreams about mom. You try it as well, only to wake up to a town where your father and sister are gone, and no one has heard of you or your family. You meet Bow (your first other party member), and you and he leave the church, only to be defeated almost immediately by a monster in a nearby cave. After losing, the screen blacks out, you're treated to the following text (with a slow, upwards scroll of a tower):

It was like waking from a long dream...
But, now his father and sister have disappeared, and no one else recognizes him...
He dreamt of a horrific demon who ripped his heart and body apart...
But it remains just a dream.

Yet, the vision remains strong.
Deep within the corners of his mind, he hears it calling.
A different world...
A world of silence...
A world of darkness.
He moves towards it, feeling both fear and exhilaration.
He succumbs, and the darkness welcomes him.

“You are the one”, the demon screeches.
Reaching deep within his heart, he realizes that it is true.
Then, in that moment, reality washes away, and the dream takes shape...

Tomorrow: Why this works, and why it doesn't.

Consistancy and Thoroughness

2008-11-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

The Last Blade 2 is most likely my favorite fighting game of all time. This is not a genre I'm a huge fan of, the list of fighting games I enjoy is pretty much this one, Guilty Gear, and Capcom vs. SNK 2. My problem with fighting games is a feature for another day, but for some reason, I enjoy this one nevertheless.

What it has going for it:
First and foremost, I like the character design. Each character has their own (obvious) personality, which matches with their fighting style, and is animated very well for its time. I will be the first to admit that the characters in Last Blade 2 are cliché, but when departing from clichés gets you “I'm an 11-foot tall rock-and-roll doctor with a giant scalpel and a paper bag over my head, who is also a humanitarian, serial killer, and maybe a child molester”-

Well, let's just say that I'll take “powerful but inexperienced protagonist, stand off-ish rival/blood relative, and the woman that tries to stop them from feuding” any day.

The basic format of the game involves choosing whether to play your character is “Power” or “Speed” mode. Power does much more damage and has more special moves, Speed unlocks significantly more combo trees. Nevertheless, the two forms are balanced surprisingly well. Additionally, since combos don't go on excessively long, the game becomes more about using a combination of high and low attacks, rather than successfully entering a difficult combo that the opponent can do nothing about once you've connected with the first hit. Perhaps it's not for everyone, but I drastically prefer this style of play.

What it doesn't:
With a few exceptions, most characters seem to have been designed with one mode (speed or power) in mind, and work significantly better in that mode than the other, so the ability to play any character in either mode is not quite as helpful as you'd think.

Oh, and did I mention that this is an SNK fighting game? Those of you not familiar with fighting game history might not know this, but SNK final bosses are bullshit. They are bullshit, and they engage in bullshit, consistently and thoroughly. I cannot imagine who okay-ed the final boss for this game having no ducking animation, so you can't tell if he's going to hit you high or low until he's already hit you! Your reflexes are worth nothing, and the final boss turns into a glorified guessing game with 50/50 odds, where you get massacred by an ancient Japanese tornado god if you pick wrong.

Defining Moment:
I'm not sure, given the game is so short, that I can pick a particular moment that defines my experience with this game. I think I'd have to pick the night where Natalie, my brother, and I stayed up until 3 AM playing an emulated version of it on my computer.

Well, that or the time I found a copy of it for sale at my local Game Dude, and discovered that by “For Sale” they meant “For Sale for over seven hundred dollars”. At least I won the bet for “who could discover the most expensive used game at game dude”.

"Blah-blu Blah Blah-blu-de"

2008-11-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

Did you ever have those big wooden boxes, with the knobs on two sides of the box, that you turn to tilt the top of the box slightly, and the challenge is to navigate a ball through the maze, while avoiding it falling into one of the many holes dotting the surface of the box? Did you hate it? Did it frustrate you endlessly with your utter inability to navigate past the most rudimentary obstacles presented to you? Did you lack of hand eye coordination and inability to estimate momentum permanently damage your pre-pubescent psyche?

If you answered yes to at least one of those questions, then ON THE BALL is for you.

I can't explain it. I hated that little box with a passion, and yet I love this game, despite the fact that they're basically just the same thing in digital form.

What it has going for it:
On the Ball fills out the gap in the “Entertaining Ball Based Games” genre nicely after Marble Madness, but before Katamary Damacy was on the scene. Aside from your ball's mysterious ability to change how bouncy it is when you hold a button, the physical are also remarkably convincing and consistent, which is basically all a game like this needs to be entertaining. Also, as a plus, you can get revenge on the stupid wooden box that rouses you from sleep in a cold sweat to this day.

What it doesn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZElZm00TOVA

There are two things to talk about here. First of all, the music on the first two levels. What the hell is that? Make no mistake, I love this game, but it doesn't somehow blind me from knowing that one of the tracks just sounds like a drum machine, with somebody going “blah-blu blah blah-blu-de” over it.

Second, as you may or may not have noticed, unless you keep your eyes on the ball in the center, watching this makes you motion sick almost instantly, which, of course, leads inexorably to the-

Defining Moment:
which would have to be the drinking game that was created by my friends and I late in my college career. The players were forced to drink after every level they competed without needing to continue, thus leading to a plateau of inebriation, where the game becomes too difficult, and you stop drinking. Sadly, as it turns out, my ability to beat all ten levels of the most difficult course was a function of my brain prioritized far above things like balance, fine motor control, or the finer points of most social graces.

Toejam Jammin'

2008-11-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

I remember seeing Toejam and Earl in 20/20 video as a kid, and thinking “This game cannot possibly be any good. This cover art is ridiculous and terrible.” To this day, I maintain that the cover art is ridiculous and terrible. The game, however, fares much better on hindsight. You control one of two aliens trying to reassemble their ship which crash landed on earth, while avoiding being harassed or killed in some way by the hostile denizens of this planet. Also, Toejam (the red one) and Earl (the one with glasses) happen to be two exceptionally funky aliens. Who knew?

What it has going for it:
There are a lot of things. The basic exploration format and the randomized levels ensured a different game every time, and most of the enemies were a not-so-subtle parody of some ridiculous human behavior, which was entertaining. However, it really all comes down to one thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzee_yoloA

If that doesn't get your red, sneaker wearing spaghetti alien bumping, I don't know what will.

What it doesn't:
Dealing with enemies in this game consists of two behaviors: Running away from them, or hoping that you happen to have some sort of weapon in your inventory (mostly consisting of tomatoes), using the weapon, and running away from the enemy anyway, because the control you have over throwing tomatoes is terrible, and you can't hit the broad side of a funky alien barn. Likewise, earth apparently consists of a bunch of floating islands vertically arranged, connected by space elevators, such that if you fall off the level, you end up on the previous level. Given your slow walking speed, this can become tiresome very quickly.

Defining Moment:
You know how I said that when you fall off one level, you end up on the previous one. Well, that's not entirely true. Every level is the same size, so when you fall off one level, you end up, on the previous level, in an area roughly corresponding to where you fell off. If there happens to be a pit in the area where you fell off on both the level you fell off and the previous level... well, you know where this going. I'd have to give my defining moment as my record of successfully falling through 11 levels in a row. Given that your progress is measured pretty much entirely on the number of the level you've gotten to, that'll turn you off a game real fast.

Return to Fort Birdman

2008-11-04T15:04:00.000-08:00

EVO is something vaguely akin to an action RPG, where you play a lifeform that tries to... uh, I guess evolve, which apparently can be done in real time now. You start out as a fish, going through the phases of amphibian, reptile, and mammal, eventually emerging as a human if you play your cards right. You accumulate EVO Points by consuming the meat left behind after you defeat an enemy (apparently herbivores can't evolve), and use those points to acquire more damaging jaws, higher defense, more HP, horns, and any number of other features.

What is has going for it:
The basic system of “gain EXP by killing enemies, spend EXP to improve specific areas of your character” is a system I've always kind of preferred to “gain EXP by killing enemies, once you have enough EXP, you gain an all around boost in power”, because it affords you more control. The end result is the same: By the end of the world you play as a particular kind of animal, you have the best in every category. If everything increased at once, it would have the same end result, but this way I can customize to my play style.

Curiously enough, the music in EVO was also of surprisingly high caliber. The fish music in particular really hit the spot of “Not entirely safe, but not entirely threatening, vaguely wondrous water environment”.

What it didn't:
If you ever need to grind for EVO points in this game, it's one of the most boring grinds you'll ever experience. Likewise, to avoid the game being almost cripplingly difficult (or maybe I'm just terrible at action RPGs), you need to gain enough EVO points to evolve a few times during a boss fight, because evolving restores your HP. When you have to grind to get those, your patience can wear a little thin.

Defining Moment:
I'm gonna have to go with this one:

That is all.

The March of the Black... Menu?

2008-11-03T13:16:00.001-08:00

Ogre Battle, or “Menu Battle”, as I have taken to calling it, was originally a SNES release. It featured huge tactical battles, in which you designed, equipped, and deployed units (consisting of between 3 and 5 characters), then moved them around to engage enemy units for the purpose of eventually pushing them back enough to fight and kill the boss, usually in a castle.

What it has going for it:
Do you love fiddling with a ton of details? Do you love attempting to maximize the effect of way too many variables at once? Likewise, the recurring tarot card theme gave the game a nice flavor. I don't know much about the history, but it was also the first game I ever played where you had an alignment, which significantly affected how people responded to your army, and eventually the ending of the game.

What it doesn't:
Oh, was my sarcasm regarding “way too many variables at once” lost on you? It's called “Menu Battle” for a reason. It's not until the game reaches the last handful of battle that there become so many enemies that the balance of “time you spend setting up your army” to “time you spend fighting with your army” even barely approaches one to one.

Defining Moment:
Every character in your army has a class and a list of statistics. Once you reach a certain level, if you have the requisite stats, you can promote to a new class. Fighters can promote to wizards, knights, beasttamers, etc, and some of your classes, if you're lucky enough to find the required item, can promote to special classes. One time, I was lucky enough to find the item to promote a wizard into a lich, giving him access to better spells, and then, immediately, discovered the item to promote a lich into a greater lich. I was ecstatic, and when I completed the battle, and went to my menu to promote Warren, my mage, only to discover I couldn't do it. I couldn't figure out why. He was a wizard, he was high enough level, his intelligence was high enough, his alignment was... wait a second. In order to become a lich, you need an alignment of between 20 and 60, 100 being the highest possible alignment. Warren has an alignment of 0?

Wait, stop. My incredibly high level sorcerer was too evil to become a lich of incalculable power? In the words of XKCD: “Fuck. That. Shit.”

The Month of November

2008-11-02T20:11:00.000-08:00

So, for the month of November, I've decided to do something a little different. I'm going to (hopefully) be posting between five and seven times a week, short little snippets, almost-but-not-quite-reviews of the games that formed my childhood (with a few more recent examples thrown in).

To begin:

Star Control is a top down shooter, where you engage a single other ship in battle, usually centered around a planet. Each ship has a primary weapon, usually some sort of cannon, varying in power, and a secondary weapon. Every ship has it's own speed, HP, fuel (used to power your guns), and a wide selection of ships.

What it had going for it:
I'm sure games of this variety existed before I played Star Control in 1991, but the battles were endlessly entertaining. The variety of ships available was impressive, and it showed a great amount of imagination in the variety of weapons available. Kind of like Super Mario World, Star Control took a really simple idea, and gave it a few extra layers of complexity, but didn't mess with the fundamental format that makes for an endlessly entertaining game.

What it didn't have going for it:
There's no real... well, game. The game consisted of dueling spaceships, and pretty much nothing else. No doubt realizing this, the developers slapped in some sort of nonsensical tactical, civilization-esque game where you colonize planets and use them to build ships, which fight with other people's ships. I know I was very young, and most of the intricacies of it were utterly beyond me, so I just kind of figured the game was good, but I couldn't understand it yet. This is untrue. In retrospect, it just sucks.

Likewise, when you're picking ships for just facing off against your brother, they weren't designed with the idea of “all of these ships are balanced for one on one combat”. If they were, I could probably balance ships better with a paper bag over my head and boxing orangutans for arms.

Defining Moment:
My brother and I are dueling, and his ship, the smallest, fastest, weakest one available, as best as we can discover, has no secondary weapon. Halfway through our first duel, his ship explodes for no reason, and he loses instantly. He picks the same ship next time, hoping to discover what happened. Again, we trade shots ineffectually, and after about 25 seconds into the match, he explodes again for no reason.

This happens two more times before we discover that apparently, the “secondary weapon” on the ship is a self-destruct mechanism, and in order to ensure that you don't do it accidentally, you need to activate it three times before it goes off. Seriously, who gave that the thumbs up? I know, let's make the worst ship in the game explode when you use its secondary weapon! It'll be awesome!

Also, curiously enough, some of you may be familiar with http://www.nablopomo.com/ which involves blogging every day for the month of November. Oddly enough, I was not when I began this exercise. Funny thing, that...

Life with Louie

2008-10-30T01:41:00.000-07:00

I've long thought that anger is an integral part of good humor. I'm not talking about Sam Kinison on stage here, screaming about operation desert storm. Good humor draws attention to the ridiculousness of our behavior, and lets us acknowledge it (semi-) safely, but you're not very likely to do that without a healthy amount of outrage, and a good clean eye on the dirty ways of the world.

Could anyone honestly tell me that they think Matt Groening had a positive childhood? And yet, the ridiculous and abusive behavior of what was no doubt Groening's own father gets tweaked probably only slightly, and suddenly, you've got Homer Simpson, who's hilarious. Life with Louie (a much better show than it was ever given credit for) was just Louie Anderson riffing on the fact that he had a shitty childhood for 22 minutes at a time, kind of like “A Christmas Story”, the animated series.

The best examples are all about processing difficult childhood issues, but it certainly doesn't stop there. Even Robert McKee has a joke in Story about a Christmas party with only comedy writers being one of the most unpleasant experiences possible.

And yet, I'd like to talk about “Family Guy”. I was never a huge fan of it, though I certainly don't object, and I find nothing wrong with the format of “I'm going to riff on pop culture references in rapid succession for an entire episode”. Nevertheless, I find the show interesting, because it so perfectly captures the Adult Swim style (despite originally starting on Fox). Personally, like with Family Guy, I'm not a huge Adult Swim fan. I'll watch a lot of their stuff if it's on, but the only show that I've ever intentionally sought out was The Venture Brothers. Really, Adult Swim is just on the very front of this new wave of humor, largely based on nihilism. I can't think of anything that typifies this better than the youTube poop phenomenon. (Has it surprised anyone else that it's yet to receive its own Wikipedia article, but is mentioned by name in the Wikipedia article on CD-is?)

If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, look at the following: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/BowserSourpussToast.PNG

If you're like me, you find that picture really funny, but can't, at first glance, explain why. The short answer for why it's funny, of course, is that it's ridiculous. It features characters you're familiar with (Mario, Bowser), doing unfamiliar things (holding bread, sponsoring bread). This isn't like some dumb picture of a political figure where somebody photoshopped a bong into their hand, that's funny (well, not really, but you get the idea) because it's somebody intentionally flipping the meaning of the photo. Someone who normally stands for not using illicit drugs becomes an icon. It's a subtle jab at the hypocrisy of whoever is in the photo (politicians, cops, church leaders, whatever), which wouldn't be funny or relevant if we didn't have a vague sense of outrage at the hypocrisy of authority figures.

Mario holding Bowser brand Sourpuss Bread is definitely not that. It's funny because it's completely nonsensical. Why would Bowser make bread? Likewise, when Peter gets into a fight with a giant chicken, the joke there is that it makes no sense.

I submit that this is the inevitable consequence of the rising tide of relativism. People are realizing that standards they were brought up with aren't necessarily universal, and on the edge of that is people experiencing a backlash, and toying around with the concept that without absolutes, there exists the possibility that nothing really matters, and everything is as good as everything else. Humor that is designed around things not making any sense brings us face to face with that fact, and lets us deal with it safely, in the same way that The Simpsons does for alcoholic abusive fathers in dysfunctional families.

Bounty, Which May or May Not Belong to a King

2008-10-23T16:22:00.001-07:00

Last night, I beat King's Bounty: The Legend. For those of you unfamiliar, it's a 2008 release, put out as a gigantic tip of the hat to the original King's Bounty, made by Jon Van Caneghem, and frequently credited as the precursor to the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

I played the re-release of King's Bounty for the Sega Genesis in 1991 when I was a kid, despite mediocre graphics, and music that was, frankly, atrocious even for the early nineties. (Come on, people! Megaman 2 was released in 1988, and that music was awesome. You have no excuse.)

The gameplay is fairly simple. Both the original and he remake are based around you controlling an army (in avatar form), and clashing with various other armies in grid based combat. The changes the remake puts into effect basically just make the original game more complicated, or are just slight tweaks to the format. The new one plays in hexes, the old one used squares, your spell book is much larger, you have a host of primary stats and equipment that affect said stats, and most troops now have their own special abilities they can use. All in all, if you even remotely enjoyed the original, or would be interested in a tactical, powergaming heavy ridiculous game, check it out.

But I'm not really here to review King's Bounty: The Legend. The plot to King's Bounty is, on the face of it, ridiculous. The tone was set rather nicely the first time I created a character, a paladin, and was told by my mentor to go pick up a sword and equip it, but not before he checked with me, “to make sure I didn't take any of those stupid vows, like 'No weapons after dark', or something else dumb.”

Further highlights include a quest where a prince asks you to retrieve a frog from a swamp, so he can kiss it and turn it into a beautiful girl, whereupon the frog you find in the swamp informs you that he asks everybody to do that, and all the frogs in the swamp are beautiful girls, but without true love, they turn back into frogs, so the prince just dumps them in his dungeon. This is all not to mention the fact that, in a conversation about this game, I said the following phrase:

“Dammit, my demoness wife can't hold the drill anymore because she has to hold her stupid baby.”

Yes, you can get married. Yes, your wife can equip items (such as a dwarven drill, giving my army -1 initiative, but +25% physical damage). Yes, your wife can have children (also giving you various and sundry bonuses), and yes, those babies, mysteriously, take up her equipment slots.

Make no mistake, I really loved playing this game (and will probably play through again on a higher difficulty), but the story was not very good. It showed a lot of attention to crafting a backstory to the events that occur in the game, but it didn't go anywhere that I didn't expect, and I certainly didn't get emotionally involved, but, as I began to elaborate on in the previous post, it pointed in a lot of directions that got me thinking, “Wouldn't it be fascinating if somebody took that and really ran with it?”

So it turns out that Endoria, the world of this game, exists on the back of a giant turtle, and the orcs, having (sort of) unwittingly set the apocalypse in motion, have kidnapped dwarven engineers and elven magics to build a flying machine to escape to another world, which they have reason to believe is on the back of another turtle floating in the great ocean of space. Therefore, you have to convince them to let you use the flying machine to fly to the ends of Endoria, to rescue the young Princess Amelie (I'm sure it would be a shame I was already married if she wasn't eight years old), and stop the dragon Haas from destroying the world.

The plot holes are everywhere. Why did the orcs go along with the plan in the first place, then decide to stay when you talked to them? The dragon had to kidnap the Princess because she's descended from the gods (King Mark is infertile, it seems), because he needs the tears of the gods to bring about the end of the world. Why on earth do the tears of the gods slay a giant turtle? Why did the dragon go insane in the first place?

Nevertheless, the overactive imagination takes something like the premise of an ocean of turtles with worlds on their backs, and can't help but think about the possibilities allowed by a premise like that. And yes, I'm aware of the similarity to Discworld, though I'm not particularly familiar with the books. Likewise, from the fact that your training involves rescuing a fake princess from a dragon, to the prince who asks you to pick up a frog from the swamp, to the fact that Amelie asks that you be made a prince after the fact, so that her rescuer can be a prince on a white horse, all point to a world that intentionally plays into fairytale tropes. (Again, seemingly not unlike Discworld)

Since I'm prone to analysis and narrative myself, I look at a world like this, and spend a lot of time thinking about the possibilities that you could come up with if you ran with it in various directions. I can't help but think that this is basically the same thing an overactive imagination does when presented with the environments in Super Metroid, or any vague premise, which is either not flushed out or flushed out poorly. I happen to think I'm a good writer, but it doesn't even really matter in this case. Because they're ideas I'm coming up with, I'm predisposed to like them, right? And because it generates, in me, ideas that I find entertaining, the game itself becomes more entertaining.

Oh, and for those who played the original King's Bounty, I can't represent how pleased I was that the final battle basically consisted of you just fighting a ton of dragons. That's the way it should be.

The Spirits Within

2008-10-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

So, I meant to pick up on intuitive understanding, especially considering the discussion inspired by my previous thoughts, which I'm very pleased about, but I was knocked out for a while by an unfortunate illness, and need to throw up something good. Intuitive understanding and this month's roundtable soon to come!

I'll just cut right to the chase here. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within just wasn't a very good movie. I've talked to a lot of people about the subject, and a lot of people have a lot of difficulty putting their finger on why. The voices were of surprisingly high caliber, the visuals were good for their time (with the exception of the conspicuous lack of facial capture technology), the quality of dialog was usually high enough to not bring down the rest of the movie, and yet...

Despite having no explicit relationship to games in the series, (in the same way that games in the series have no explicit relationship to each other) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is definitely a “Final Fantasy” movie. For those of you who don't know the movie, the plot can be summed up as such:

The film is set in a post apocalyptic world where humanity has dropped the ball, and been forced to cede mastery of the earth to a more adapted, (arguably) less intelligent species. Humanity is slowly being pushed to extinction. Enter a young woman, who's able to save the day by seeing the planet as the victim of, rather than the giver of pain, but not before she butts heads with the worst that humanity has to offer in terms of selfishness and short-sightedness.

Those of who who've already heard my deal on this probably already know where this is going, but does this sound familiar? That's just a plot synopsis of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, goodness knows I reference it often enough on here.

The similarity is intentional, mind you. Even the opening scene of The Spirits Within is an homage to Nausicaa: the main character running around in the depths of the post-apocalyptic world, weaponless, observing the otherworldly beauty of the supposedly ruined surface of the earth.

Given that Miyazaki can pretty much be credited with single handedly shaping the face of Japanese environmentalism, and, more important to the discussion, popularizing the “Gaia hypothesis” (the suggestion that the earth itself is a kind of living organism), there can be very little doubt that Miyazaki, probably unintentionally, shaped the face of the Final Fantasy series, and by extension, Japanese Role Playing Games in almost all their forms.

(I'm glossing over drawing the line between early Final Fantasy and Miyazaki because it's merely a stepping stone to my point regarding the Final Fantasy film, but if there's enough support, I might go back and write more on the tangential topic of the environmentalism contained in early Final Fantasies)

When a big blockbuster is made out of a book, TV show, game, or comic, and it sucks, it's usually blasted for being somehow “untrue” to the original Intellectual Property from which it was derived (provided the original IP was any good in the first place): League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Starship Troopers, Resident Evil, the list goes on.

And yet, The Spirits Within is the perfect counter example to this trend. Given that Final Fantasy was so heavily shaped by Miyazaki, what could be more representative of the IP than a giant homage to the quintessential Miyazaki film? Nonetheless, the movie just wasn't all that good.

Why?

I could go on and pick apart every little part of The Spirits Within, and talk about how this didn't work, or that could have been better, but that wouldn't really get us anywhere. Instead, I submit, for those of you (myself included) who are Final Fantasy fans but didn't like The Spirits Within, that the Final Fantasy that exists in your head is just better than the actual Final Fantasy. A friend of mine has been telling me for quite a while that the reason why he liked Final Fantasy 6 so much better than any subsequent ones is because Final Fantasy 6 had poor enough graphics, and just the right about of vagueness in the dialog to leave things up to his imagination. He's just exceptionally aware and up front about what I think virtually everyone who grew up playing video games (particularly RPGs) does: Fill in the gaps with their own imagination.

There's very little actual time, if you go back and play the first disc of Final Fantasy 7, devoted to building the relationship between Cloud and Aeris, but the player nonetheless understands what the nature of the relationship is supposed to be, and can fill in the rest. The gravity of Aeris's death is less based on the quality of the relationship built within the confines of the actual game, and much much more on the quality of the relationship that exists within the player's head.

At first glance, this seems so obvious as to be meaningless. Of course the player's experience is incredibly important in how they experience a game. If I hate Japanese RPGs, I'm not going to get invested enough to care about any of the character development, let alone the death of a character part of the way through the game. It's not even that revolutionary or meaningful, I think, to suggest that the reality of the game is less important than the player's projection onto it.

So why did Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within disappoint? I could make an analogy about how trying to duplicate a Miyazaki movie is like trying to cover “Born to Run” with your garage band (read: a bad idea, don't invite comparison), but I think the truth of the matter is that the actual Final Fantasy IP is just not as good as the “Final Fantasy” that exists in the consciousness of the people who saw The Spirits Within.

This isn't just me whining about how fanboys are never satisfied, and how everybody and their mother has a secret Sephiroth/Vincent slash fic under their mattress. (Is it still a slash fic if they're from the same IP? I don't keep up on my definitions.) The fact is, there's a lot less to Metroid than everyone thinks too. I remember not even understanding that Samus without her suit on was the same character in the original Metroid. I thought it was a second character for the two player version that I didn't know how to unlock. She didn't even have a clear physical appearance until Super Metroid, and only that if you could beat the game in under three hours.

Nonetheless, the environments in Super Metroid were so evocative, those with overactive imaginations (a hallmark of the geek) couldn't help but speculate about the events surrounding them. Would their explanations (if they existed) be as good as the vague sense of wonder the game left you with? I doubt it.

How many of you remember being impressed with the romance between Locke and Celes? I know I was. Well, surprise, the number of lines out of either of them that can be assumed to have an even vaguely romantic connotation number under 25. You get a few more lines when you tack on anything he says about Rachel, but at the heart of it, there's nothing there. Nonetheless, people, myself included, ate it up.

So, is this a bad thing? Hardly. Nonetheless, any attempt to flush out all the dark corners of an IP, especially in a movie, is doomed to failure. Those little niggling aspects (sometimes those big niggling aspects) are always better left to the imagination. Just like how the histories I made up for the locations in Legend of Mana were way better than the actual histories, Braid captured the imagination of the Internet community because of how much it left unsaid.

Shaking the Tree

2008-09-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

In continuation of the last post on gender, and the ideals thereof, I think one of the problems with trying to create a strong, inherently female main character in a game is that passivity is widely regarded as an essentially female quality. Furthermore, we in the West are so heavily inundated with masculinity that we're heavily predisposed to think of activity as good and passivity as bad.

The “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” philosophy is what everyone learns in grade school makes America great. In reality, there's nothing wrong with that mindset, but like just about everything else, when pursued to the exclusion of other things, it's problematic. So much emphasis is placed on personal fortitude, (“going the distance” as I put it last post) personal ability, and the kind of strength that's required to defeat your foe, that we lose sight of the relative importance of nurturing, passivity, and intuitive understanding.

So, to recap, we've got a double whammy here. First of all, we have a culture that places so much emphasis on the traditionally masculine qualities that we devalue the feminine ones. Second, if the discussion is to be on games, we can't go very far without addressing the fact most people don't think that a game where you don't actually defeat a big enemy at the end would be all that fun. (Even if, like in Fallout, you defeat them by talking) Yes, there are exceptions to this, wildly successful exceptions, in fact, but a majority of games are built around this framework.

I just started reading We by Robert A. Johnson. It's a book that appeared in the wake of Joseph Campbell, applying the concept of Jungian analysis to myths in order to distill universal truths. Personally, I don't put a lot of stock in Jung's concept of the Collective Unconscious, especially as some sort of dynamic information system, but so far the book has had some very interesting things to say about Courtly Love as an institution.

Specifically, that Courtly Love (Check here if the concept isn't instantly familiar to you) is based on the idealization of the lady involved in the exchange. Johnson asserts (and this is debated, as best as I can tell) that the nature of the relationship was entirely non-physical, and the purpose was to bring the relationship up to a more spiritual level. The lady was idealized, so it became necessary for the knight to engage in ridiculous dragon slaying acts to demonstrate his achievement of the ideal of masculinity.

Is slaying a dragon better than being worthy of adoration? Is the sword better than the harp? Is the ability to accomplish your goals no matter what adversity arises better than the ability to remain sensitive to the changing conditions around you?

These questions are way too amorphous to be actually seriously investigated, but I think the point is made that not all of them can be answered with “yes”. Sadly, there aren't very many dragons around to be slain anyway. Either way, I'm not here to make an exhaustive list of feminine and masculine qualities, and it's important to note that everybody has these qualities, the question is to what amount. Likewise, my basis for “masculine” versus “feminine” is not based on any sort of observation on my part, so much as the historical context in which these concepts are frequently viewed.

The qualities that interest me specifically are that of intuitive understanding and passivity. These are generally downplayed in the west, and that's a huge shame, I think, but the question at hand is what these mean in games. Sadly, it seems both have the cards stacked against them when it comes to placement in video games.

Regardless of any axiom about violence and non-violence, it's hard to argue that, in a game, doing things isn't more fun than not doing things. Can passivity really be a viable means to reach some end in a game?

You can definitely craft a satisfying climax out of a moment in which your main character must decide not to fight someone, establishing the value of pacifism over violence, but if that moment came before you had some final test of skill to determine whether you were good enough at the game to beat it, wouldn't you feel cheated? I kind of imagine that I would. Activity turns so easily into challenges in a game because there are so many kinds of activity. The challenge is in picking which kind of activity you need to engage in (and then correctly engaging in the desired kind of activity). Maybe I'm looking at this too narrowly, but can anyone be said to have to chose the right kind of passivity? If asked, I would have said that the only thing you choose is the right time to be passive.

You can't make a game around that, can you? I concede it might be possible in an academic sense, but I think to deal with game design issues, this is a bit of a narrow definition. The true balance of activity and passivity is one that you achieve in aesthetics and narrative, not game mechanics. That seems like the trick here, the word balance.

Do we need more female characters in general in games? Of course. What we really need, though, is characters who act female. We can all agree that another ridiculous fantasy game with a scantily armor-clad woman with a sword is not what I'm talking about. Why? Because they're just the dumb action hero character reskinned for sex appeal to the same male audience. We don't just need realistic female characters (though even just that would be a Godsend), we need male characters that embrace feminine values. (Cecil's conversion into a Paladin in FFIV is a nice one)

Ay yi yi, this has gone on long enough. I'll leave intuitive understanding to be tackled in part three.

I'll Be That Girl

2008-08-17T18:17:00.001-07:00

Before I was derailed a bit (if you can call it that) by my contribution to the Round Table and others, I spent some time talking about archetypes, specifically the difference between two similar female archetypes: the healer and the warrior princess.

At the end of the post, I posed the question of why these archetypes recur so often, and why they're so powerful. Natalie, in the comments, said something very interesting:

When it comes to Heinlein, I can't help but feel like... his (dirty old man) status does taint the validity of his ideas. But here's the thing: he nevertheless makes me wish the world worked the way he proposes.

I think this captures a fundamental appeal of fictional storytelling, but right now, I'm a bit more interested (inspired a bit by Corvus's mention of a more in-depth discussion on gender in games) in the nature of strength as it relates to gender, which I think also keys into the appeal of these archetypes quite nicely.

Everybody in western culture is familiar with the pinnacle of male strength, the action hero. They're physically strong, they're agile, they're smart, they're witty, they're resourceful, and more than anything else they can go the distance. Maybe they don't believe it at the start, but every action hero must believe, before they defeat the final villian, that they can.

I'm reminded of the Lord of the Rings:

"I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness, but I know I can't turn back... I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the shire. I must see it through, sir, if you understand me."

Must of that book is about whether or not Frodo is, in fact, willing to go the distance.

All of the tenets of the typical male hero, I believe, revolve around this issue. In the case of the action hero (which is most often analagous to the main character of a video game), all of the secondary traits (which are still part of the whole picture, mind you) serve to reinforce the action hero's ability to overcome the obstacle set before him. The idea of "It is within my power to overcome this obstacle, and I will do everything within my power to do so" is the message behind action heroes that resonates with the audience so well, and the more the action hero has to sacrifice, the more notable his journey is.

We see very few female action heroes, and almost as few female main characters in games. When we do, the female aspect usually feels utterly superfluous, and is added for the purpose of throwing sex-appeal into a film that's already going to attract a primarily male audience.

Why do we see so few decent female characters in these roles? The two most common reasons, which are both very true, are: the movies/games themselves primarily appeal to men, and the people making the movies/games themselves are primarily men.

And yet, there are more and more people, as evidenced by the resounding positive feedback that Corvus recieved, who are finding this unsatisfactory. The problem isn't the strength of the male characters, the problem is the dearth of strong female characters.

Paul Wells on Miyazaki (pulled from Andrew Osmond's Foundation article "Nausicaa and the Fantasy of Hayao Miyazaki", which can be found here):

"Miyazaki establishes authorial tendencies by refuting the tenets of films constructed on masculine terms... (His) complex heroines are consistently engaged in the pursuit of self-knowledge and a distinctive identity. His use of the feminine discourse subverts patriarchal agendas both in film making and story-telling.
"As Miyazaki suggests, 'We've reached a time when the male-oriented way of thinking is reaching a limit. The girl or woman has more flexibility. This is why a female point of view fits the current times.'"

While a little more academic than I would have put it, that really hits the nail on the head. There will always be a place for the action hero, but the hill of the digital world is getting big enough for both of those hombres, I think. So if action hero is the male ideal of strength, what's the female?

Common Thread

2008-08-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

As I've said on a few previous Round Table entry comments, I find the "Video Games cause violent crime" discussion hilarious. Not good hilarious, like "laugh and squirm like an itchy bear cub" hilarious.

The argument is invariably based on some sort of a vague hunch that the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket, and that video games and violent crime are just one of the symptoms. Violent crime is down, people. Way down. I'm not going to argue that violent video games cause a decrease in violent crime, but it's hard to argue that they cause an increase, when there's no actual increase to be observed. The subject needs no futher discussion.

Likewise, I've never really put much stock in the "getting your ya-yas out" argument, which suggests that video games actually do reduce violent crime, because they provide outlets for people who would otherwise be likely to engage in violent behavior. Violent crime has been on a steady decline since the 70s, I beleive, with no marked change that can be linked to the popularity of video games. That subject needs no further discussion either.

So what do video games teach us? They teach us pattern recognition, they teach us hand/eye coordination, they teach us faster reflexes, they teach forethought (in the same way that chess does), but to assume that any of these skills are easily applicable in real life is taking, I think, a very large, not necessarily intuitive step. Unless I repair watches, or compete in some sort of speed-knitting Olympic event, my hand/eye coordination will probably not be tested very often beyond the "functioning member of society" level. And while being good at Advance Wars might make me a better Chess player, I hardly think that being good at Chess counts as a "Socially Responsible Lesson", to quote this month's Round Table description.

To make a long story not in any notable way shorter: Do video games teach socially responsible lessons? Yes. Is there any reason, inherent to the medium, why they can't? No. Do they make it a habit to do so? No.

So what "Socially Responsible Lessons" have I learned from games? Sadly, the kinds of things that I would say I've learned are the easiest to verbalize. I consider myself entertained and edified after watching "Rebecca", but did the movie teach me a socially responsible lesson? That's harder to prove. Likewise, I enjoyed playing Portal, and because I have, I now have a shared pool of experience to draw from with virtually everyone else on the internet, but is that really a socially responsible lesson?

Barring Edu-tainment (which I'm totally in favor of), I think this is the most socially responsible lesson that games can teach us. By giving our generation a sense of shared context, games provide identity, ease communication, and build a foundation for all further creative interactions.

Wow, that's a tall order. Let me say it again. By giving our generation a sense of shared context, games provide identity, ease communication, and build a foundation for all further creative interactions. Games aren't really special in this regard, I just happen to believe that they join the illustrious ranks of Books, Movies, Music, Television, and any other creative endeavour.

The first two items on that thesis statement can be granted as common sense. If I read a joke about "The Cake is a Lie" on the SomethingAwful forums, I need to have played Portal to get the joke, and if I'm meeting someone for the first time, and I find out he/she is a big fan of Smash Bros, there's an instant comraderie there.

Regarding the concept of building a foundation for further creative endeavours, who can doubt that the creative gamer minds of my age (early 20s) that are now making it into the working world were impacted by Aeris's death, the search for the way to recruit General Leo into your party, and the sheer tenacity of the little guy from Frogger. In as much as games can tell stories (and probably even farther), they contribute to my generation's shared context, which is a particularly valuable lesson, I'd say.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Out of my Head

2008-08-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

Due to some interesting business related hurdles I've had to jump through, I've decided to postpone the follow up to the last post in favor of talking about the nature of business, specifically, the nature of any highly production oriented business, like the game industry.

In my short stint in the industry since my college graduation at the beginning of this year, I've learned quite a few lessons. Though some pertain specifically to this industry, in general they are axioms of the business world. These merely reflect my experience combined with my common sense, treat them as you will.

A lot of companies say they value demonstrations of ability over previous experience. Very few actually mean this.

Yelling at people never accomplishes anything, but it can sometimes make you feel better.

Everybody waits to the last minute.

Anything that has to be "processed" rather than "dealt with" automatically takes an extra week.

No one cares why you can't deliver.

Even fewer people care what you had to go through in order to deliver.

Timely completion automatically boosts you into the 90th percentile of competence.

"Green light" is a verb.

E-mail is the final authority in confirmation.

"Managing a process", while non-sensical sounding, can be surprisingly labor intensive.

Everybody CCs everybody on everything.

Cyrus the Great is credited as one of the first great thinkers on the subject of Human Rights. (Believe it or not, I did learn this on the job)

It's not really who you know, so much as who knows you.

Checks get signed when the person who does the signing feels like it.

There is no single trait that is more necessary to success in business than doing what you are asked to do, the first time you are asked to do it.

All humorous quipping aside, the most valuable lesson I've learned since entering the work force is that there's no key set of qualifications requried for success, particularly in the video game industry. Many places list jobs that require certain amounts of experience, and getting that first job with no experience can be very difficult, but for those who are interested, there's nothing for it other than to just put enough bird shot into the air that you're sure to hit something.

I think this really taps into a fundamental difference between an immature and a mature way of thinking. I, for one, certainly figured that something would happen in college that would prepare me for the working world. Strictly speaking, something did, I suppose, but there certainly wasn't the magic switch flipping that we all kind of half expect as kids. I'm reminded of Calvin's dad saying, "I would have been in much less of a rush to become an adult if I knew that everything was ad-libbed." It seems that most of the time in life, there's no magic quality that you can possess that makes you exceptionally ready for adulthood, working in the entertainment industry, or anything of the sort.

It's the same kind of harsh, kind of reassuring lesson as the fact that when under a deadline, no one cares what you have to do to make the deadline: the bleak, existential wasteland of the search for employment in the game industry. Want to get into casual games? Make one. Can't find anybody to program it? Do it yourself. Don't know how? Learn. The fact that nobody's handing it to you is counterpointed by the fact that nothing (nobody?) is keeping you from it.

Would I say I'm an "adult" now? That seems a bit presumptuous of me, but I've certainly enjoyed learning that last lesson there. What have you learned recently?

Kind Lady

2008-07-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

The Previous Blog Posts Referenced Within this post can be found in links within the post, but can also be found here:

The Warrior Mother: Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
The Holy Mother of Nisan

Having just finished Time Enough for Love, I feel compelled to blog on the subject.

The book details some of the exploits of the oldest man alive, over two thousand years. It's mostly viewed through the lens of his descendants wanting to record his wisdom, the kind of wisdom one can only accrue from living in four different millenia, two hundred different planets, uncountable professions, etc. No single series of events unifies the story, other than the involvement of Woodrow Wilson Smith in all of them to some degree. Among the primary stories of the book, however, are the story of Woodrow's greatest love, his travelling back in time to meet his birth family, his relationship with a self-aware computer, and his rekindling of his love for life associated with the recording of his previous exploits.

Thematically, the book is about two things (or at least two things stood out to me, there's a lot there): The healing power of love, and the relationship between love and sex.

Heinlein asserts, in a thesis kind of way, that sex is a natural extension of love, and that most social taboos, while they may have served some purpose at some time, are just that, evolutionary tools. As humanity grows beyond their usefulness, they deserve to be dropped. Example: the traditional taboo on incest serves no purpose once genetics advances to the point to pinpoint all possible reinforceable defects. Not that it suddenly makes it a good idea, but it's morally equivalent to having a child with a someone you're unrelated to, who happens to have the same chance of reinforcing an undesirable trait.

Likewise, he seems to suggest that concerns about monogamy, adultery, birth control, and so forth might have been pragmatic at some point, but have outlived their usefulness. He argues (indirectly, of course) that sex is a natural extension of love, and for those who are capable of loving many people at once, there's no reason why they shouldn't.

This is somewhat amusing because, to a large degree, Robert Heinlein is clearly just a very dirty old man, the kind that you call the school about when you find out that he's coaching your 16 year old daughter's volleyball team. And yet, he's a good enough writer, and adamant enough about love that it's difficult to be put off by his emphasis on sex. As Natalie said when I was discussing the book, "He's a dirty old man, but he's a very genteel dirty old man."

Which brings me to my second point. In the subplot about the main character finally tiring of life, and then rekindling his passion, a woman named Tamara is brought in, who is, essentially, a prostitute. Of course, in Heinlein's world, without social taboos, prostitution is elevated to an art form, not unlike any other performance based skill. Woodrow describes what he suffers from as a sickness, and says that Tamara cured him. Not just (though it is involved) by sleeping with him, but by her sheer presence, care, and love.

So appears the second theme of the book. Heinlein asserts that love by itself heals, or, more specifically, that in these people (almost exclusively women, possibly reflecting a reality, or possibly just a bias on the author's part) who have the healing touch, the most important quality is an unfathomable capacity for love.

It's important to note the cause-effect relationship here. These women have enough love in their hearts for the entire world, and sex is a natural extension of love. They are so good at what they do because they truly love each and every one of their clients. The fact that they can make money loving people is a happy coincidence in Heinlein's world, which in no way cheapens the experience itself.

The healing power of love, and the archetype of the woman that has enough love in their heart for the entire world are common themes. (Heinlein's Healer Archetype has a high co-occurrence rate with The Warrior Mother, though it's worth noting that they aren't quite the same thing)

Xenogears, among numerous others, makes the same assertion (the tremendous healing power of being loved by the right person), though I chose this one in particular because the woman who has enough love in her heart for the entire world is so cleanly crystallized in the form of Elly.

Since Elly figured so heavily into my definition of The Warrior Mother, I think it's time I elucidate the difference between the two, and slightly amend my definition of both.

Both archetypes, The Warrior Mother and Heinlein's Healer, have this mysterious power used for some kind of healing. Both are almost exclusively women. (Usually because a power that's deeply seated in pacifism and healing is thought of as a traditionally female quality)

However, first of all, the Healer, as it appears in Time Enough for Love is not a multidimensional character, while the Warrior Mother almost always necessitates a character arc. (which I explain here) Secondly, the Warrior Mother still loves, but she loves fiercely, compared to the gentle passion of the Healer. The relevant analogy, as was mentioned before, is to a she-bear. She's selfless, and loves her cubs, but will absolutely kick your ass if you mess with them, and is much more likely to do so if you threaten those she loves than if you threaten her.

That being said, I think my original list needs to be revised. Mist (Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance), Schala (Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross), Yuna (Final Fantasy 10), Aeris (Final Fantasy 7), and a few others from the list, are really versions of Heinlein's Healer. Female, quiet, humble to the point of lack of self-awareness, and charged with some great duty because of the immensely positive quality of their soul.

The Warrior Mother archetype, more accurately defined, doesn't necessitate that their love be all encompassing, merely that they love, and do so with a fierce conviction. Since their power more often implies violence, they are more disposed towards coming of age stories associated with mastering their power. Likewise, their power is more often clearly defined, though often just as magical. For those of curious, Terra (Final Fantasy 6), Marona (Phantom Brave), Lufia (Lufia and the Fortress of Doom), and Elly (Xenogears) stay on the list.

Elly, in fact, (and by Extension, Nausicaa, more on that later) is the perfect embodiment of both archetypes at once. She is quiet, doubts herself, must come to terms with her power, fights and kills to protects those she loves, is capable of loving the entirety of humanity at once, and has some sort of magical power associated with her love that allows her to heal the hearts of those around her.

Next, why are these archetypes so popular, and so powerful?

The Elitist Nature of Difficulty

2008-07-15T23:22:00.000-07:00

This month’s roundtable topic of difficulty (hosted by Corvus at Man Bytes Blog) seems particularly apropos, given my current absorption in Landstalker, one of the most notoriously difficult games I’ve ever played.

The fact that I’m enjoying Landstalker this much necessitates the question of why I put up with as much punishment from this game as I do. Instead, however, I’d like to tackle the question of varying difficulty levels on a single game.

I played through Fire Emblem for the GC, and enjoyed the normal mode a great deal, but I found that it was a little easy for me. I grew up playing Shining Force 1 and 2, Vandal Hearts, and have probably sunk about 24 days of play time into various versions of the Advance Wars Series. Turn based strategy comes fairly easy to me.

So, I went back to play Fire Emblem on Hard difficulty, and found myself utterly uninterested. By “Hard” difficulty, they just meant that they had buffed the attack, defense, and evade stats of all of the enemies (or similarly nerfed all the same stats on all of my characters). The AI, as best as I could tell, remained entirely unchanged. The game was most definitely more difficult, but more difficult just because they punished me harder for the errors I committed. The same misjudge of how much damage an enemy does that might cause a small shuffle in my battle plan before now would require a restart, because I lost an important character.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very pleased, and didn’t complete the game a second time. I think I speak for everyone when I say that an increased difficulty level that encompasses more inventive AI, and more difficult puzzles is always more rewarding that an increased difficulty level that merely increases the health and damage of all the monsters.

Advance Wars, particularly Advance Wars Dual Strike, were very good examples of a hard mode that didn’t gimp your abilities in any way, but required that you made much more efficient use of your resources to pass the challenge at hand. Sometimes, the computer was more intelligent, sometimes the odds were just stacked more heavily against you, but it required that you play the game not just tighter, but better. How exactly they accomplished will be saved for when I write about my love affair with the series, but suffice it to say that the game accomplishes this impressive task.

Of course, the problem with producing more satisfying variations in difficulty is that it requires more work. The relationship between the riddles in Silent Hill on low difficulty and extreme difficulty is almost non-existent, to the point that it might as well just be an entirely new puzzle game. That hardly seems fair, though. In order to have really satisfying difficulty variations, your designers need to work twice as hard as your writers, composers, artists, or producers? (Assuming everyone works equally hard to begin with, which is a patent falsehood) Of course, it’s also a patent falsehood that creating a new overlay of difficulty over an old game is exactly twice as much work, but I do submit that there is a rather linear correlation between additional work and additional enjoyment derived from the difficulty level.

So, what then? Wouldn’t a designer’s efforts be better put into creating additional games, a sequel or some such to the hypothetical game they’re working on in the first place? Yes, I’m aware this is a shamefully simplistic way to look at things, but assuming that you have an extra body of work that your designers are going to do, where do you put it to maximize the your profit?

More satisfying difficulty variations translates into more replay value, which can indirectly translate into sales, but what about just making another game, using the hypothetical puzzles that have been designed? Would that game just have to be entirely more difficult than the game that came before? It requires questioning the egalitarian nature of games. If there’s another chapter in a story that I’m involved in, but it got created to go with an insanely difficult set of puzzles that I can’t beat, I’m going to be pissed that this next chapter of the story is inaccessible to me, because I’m not good enough at the game.

My initial reaction to “I want to see more content, but I’m not good enough at the game to get there” is that it’s kind of unfair, but what is the whole concept of difficulty, other than something that prevents people from accessing new content entirely at their own pace? A more difficult game gives us a larger sense of accomplishment when we overcome the challenges that have been set out for us, but no matter how easy the game, we have to believe that there’s someone who can’t quite make it over the last hurdle. Do they just get shafted?

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Maya

2008-07-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

This is a short story I wrote in my spare time last year, spurred on by an excellent English teacher I had at the time. Thoughts?

Maya had spent her entire life searching for her “Other Half”. Her high school career was spent deflecting questions from her mother about “bringing home a nice boy” and being asked for help on her classmate’s homework. Maya knew that her mother would laugh at her optimism, (the sudden departure of Maya’s father had affected her profoundly) so she kept up with her muttered responses and non-committal answers, forcing her mother to pretend more and more that she really knew who her daughter was.

Maya followed her dream, her more public dream, and went to a prestigious pre-med program in Washington, in hopes of becoming a pediatrician, but her valedictorian speech contained nothing about how she didn’t really want to go to Washington at all, and how much she hated being “the smart one”. It didn’t say anything at all about her dream to be a farmer’s wife, homeschooling her children and hauling their harvest to market.

But go to Washington she did, and she didn’t hate it as much as she thought she would. She planted a garden, and bonded with a few other women who had rented plots of land in the same area. They talked almost daily, but Maya didn’t know anything about them other than this one’s penchant for radishes, and that that one sometimes shared her homegrown grapefruits with the other girls. She noted with some dismay that she was the youngest by far, and one of a few ones who wasn’t married.

Things continued like this for almost three years. Maya gardening, visiting her mother only when she had to, staying in as often as she could. She used some grant money she got because of her grades to rent her own tiny house on the edge of town, where she planted fruit trees and left out bowls of food for the stray dogs and cats in the neighborhood. Most of the trees were tiny, but she purchased a single semi-mature apple tree, hoping to have a crop as early as next year.

She always shied away from getting a pet, though, because she didn’t want the responsibility, so she was surprised when a dog that had been hit by a car turned up in her meager front yard, and she found herself carrying it inside to help ease its final moments. She didn’t know if it was a feral dog or not, but it waited patiently, still unable to stand, while she got a blanket to wrap it in, and it calmed down when she held its head in her arms. The dog died, of course, the Mercedes had made sure of that, but Maya still felt sick to her stomach having watched it.

Maya buried the dog with the blanket in her backyard, at the base of the still growing apple tree. She sat, staring at the mound of dirt until well after it got dark, before going back inside and resuming her studying.

A year later, the tree had fully matured, and Maya brought apples to share with the women at the garden.

Kya: Dark Lineage

2008-06-29T22:55:00.000-07:00

So, I have an embarrassing confession to make.

Kya: Dark Lineage is one of my favorite adventure games ever.

So, why is this embarrassing? It received mediocre to slightly-above-average reviews, and wasn't given enough publicity to draw any kind of universal disdain. So why am I embarrassed about this?

Well, let's see what's wrong with the game. There are a number of things wrong, but three stand out as ones that I'm actually embarrassed about.

For starters, the voice acting is terrible. Like, even worse than average, and the dialog is ridiculous. The story is nothing to shout about (travel to this strange world and unlock your father's legacy, only to discover he's a jerk, and then beat him), but whatever.

Second, I'm iffy about any game that consists exclusively of a modestly hot girl who does nothing but interact with a bunch of anthropomorphic dog people. Oh well, at least they're not foxes.

Finally, and more importantly, so many of the mini-games in Kya: Dark Lineage pander to the same crowd as Mountain Dew commercials. Snowboarding, Sky Diving, etc. I'm stunned that you don't spend any time grinding on rails or throwing devil horns while head banging to some terrible metal band. I haven't played the game recently enough to remember whether it substitutes the letters “ex” at any point with the insufferable “X-” prefix.

That being said, this game features among the finest level design of any adventure game I've ever played. I don't have the memory or the inclination to break down every single area of the game (and it's a fairly large adventure game), but it succeeds in the amazing task of consistently amazing me with “This is a challenge that is unlike any other challenge I have experienced in this game.” Obviously, there is some overlap: You play minigames more than once, combat is the same fundamental mechanic (though increasing in difficulty and complexity).

Shadow of the Colossus did a good job of giving you what seemed to be a fairly limited toolset and having you make use of it in more and more creative ways as the game went on. Though, unlike Shadow of the Colossus, your toolset expands drastically as you play, Kya still blows me away for their sheer volume of multi-purposed tools (tools in this case just referring to anything that you use to make your character interact with the environment).

Example: You have a set of controls to navigate how fast you move while in free fall, which you use to collect items and avoid obstacles when you fall. This tool gets re-purposed later when you navigate horizontally through an updraft, and use it to control your vertical position, which is then re-purposed again to control your jump distance when trying to make leaps in particularly windy areas.

Likewise, when you learn to climb latticed walls to access new places, you get a tool, but when you hang off the sides of crates to avoid detection, you're using the tool in a different way. Even though it's obviously devised by the game designers, this kind of re-purposing of existing tools in creative ways is satisfying on a very visceral level to me, which is what Kya: Dark Lineage delivers on so many times. I could try and make a clumsy list of all the things you do, despite not having replayed the game in quite some time, but I'd rather go off on why I think that aspect is so fun.

I suspect it's because of the implicit suggestion that I'm fooling the game somehow. That is, of course, ridiculous, a game that requires you to “fool” it to be able to be beaten is a terrible game (though I still can't figure out how you're supposed to get out of that one room in the mine in Landstalker, cause I'm pretty sure that “jumping on top of an enemy, and hoping that the knockback pushes you onto the head of the other enemy so you can jump onto this ledge” isn't what the developers intended). Nonetheless, the implication that you're somehow fooling the game, or at least the denizens of the game, reinforces the same fun factor as skill mastery.

www.8kindsoffun.com is a rather amazing source on the subject. If you're interested, I encourage you to check it out. I could keep going, but I think it'd just devolve into rambling. More on the aesthetics of fun later.

The RPA Bi-Monthly Newsletter

2008-06-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

For years, the plight of the majestic robot has gone underrepresented in the popular media.

In Japan, time traveling robots have been hunted to extinction. Using high tech gadgets that can catch as many as 6 robots at once, peacefully frolicking through the negadimension, heartless poachers kill these robots for their flux capacitors, and frequently leave the rest of the robot debilitated, and subject to time-erosion.

No robot should die from time-erosion.

For a donation of mere micropennies a day, you can do your part in the fight to save these beautiful, untamed creatures from an irreversible fate.

Did you know that robot slavery is still practiced in many first world nations today? And though many excellent law enforcement agencies are taking steps to eliminate the barbaric practice of robot battles- we can do more.

The Robot Preservation Association is devoted to three pronged assault on the factors that threaten continued robot survival. We work to address the economic factors that threaten robot habitats, fight for sustainable robot preserves, and raise the public's awareness of continued threats to robots through robot advocacy.

What's new with the RPA this month:

MI Chapter Leader Kimberly Binder is continuing her series of in home meetings about safe robot pet practices. "We're getting a lot of support, and meeting attendance has swelled into the hundreds" says Binder. Click here to read the full story.
Rock Trio Binary finished their "Human Like You" tour to a sold out crowd at the Staples Center in Downtown LA this week. 15% of all ticket and merchandise sales from the tour are donated directly to the RPA and its offspring organizations. Click here to visit the band's website.
Hank Marshall's 15th Annual Robotary Club fundraiser dinner was attended by hundreds, and raised over $17,000 for robot related causes. Click here to see pictures from the event.

Getting Involved

Urge your congressman to fight for a larger budget share for electro-environmental causes in the supplemental appropriations bill. Visit: Our Governmental Action Center or Download: Our PDF on local governmental action
Boycott Companies known to rely on robo-sweatshops. Visit our Consumer Awareness page
Our Sister Organization, By Robots, For Robots, has almost raised enough money to begin construction on the first ever automated moonbase robot nature preserve. Click here to donate

God Bless, and remember, together, we can make a difference to robots.

Gender and MMOs

2008-06-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Girls Don't Game's article on hardcore raiding in WoW, I've gotten to thinking about Gender Roles in MMOs. Though “games” are still heavily biased towards a male audience, the MMO genre enjoys a more balanced gender distribution than any other genre except casual games. It's a widely accepted fact, though I am failure at citation, that women bond primarily through social interaction, and men bond primarily through engaging in activities in parallel. A man is more likely to consider someone his friend after they have played a game together, as opposed to talking to him.

This is a large part of why raiding (casually, in my case) appeals to me. I enjoy working together with other people to overcome challenges of various difficulties. However, as much as it is an oversimplification to say that all male raiders in WoW do so for that reason, it's an even bigger oversight to say that the High End Raid Environment only appeals to stereotypically male behavior. Of course, raids aren't really about social interaction primarily. I like chatting it up as much as the next guy, but I'm there to do my part to fight some giant dude.

However, my empirical observations (which is worth nothing from a statistical perspective, I know) show that of women playing WoW, they overwhelmingly favor healing roles in raids. If we assume this is true (again, HUGE statistical oversight, I know), let's ask why.

The answer “healing is a less competitive more socially oriented role” spring to mind for why this is. It's a bit of a canned answer, though, so before we go too far on that one, let's look at “competition” in an MMO.

In a PvE raid situation, aside from particular boss mechanics, the only direct competitive role is that of the damage dealer. Both tanks and healers are charged with letting the rest of the party do their job efficiently.

Every moment a DPS class spends taking evasive action is time they spend not doing damage. Every moment a DPS class spends dead is time they're not doing damage. Though the mechanics are very different, but there's only two roles: killing the monsters, and making it easier for other people to do so.

I can't help but feel that there is a link between standard MMO roles and games that are generally considered to appeal more to women that hasn't been explored yet.
All ya'all hold onto your britches on this one. I'm gonna do me some research; might have just stumbled onto something very interesting.

Dialogue and Story

2008-06-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me the other day about my repeated comments about how forgiving I am about dialogue, which prompted me to start thinking about the difference between dialogue and story, precisely.

It’s obvious what dialogue is. Dialogue represents all of the things that come out of character’s mouths over the course of a game. Though it doesn’t strictly fit into the definition, I also tend to use it to refer to most anything that is written and designed to advance the plot or deepen your understanding of the character. Someone’s diary entry in Silent Hill isn’t dialogue in the strictest sense of the word, but I tend to lump it all together.

All of these things are part of the story, to be sure, but the story of a game is a broader category. I tend to define story as "the order and significance of events designed to culminate in a satisfying conclusion". Unfortunately, using this definition, the term “story” is so broad as to be almost useless. Even DOOM has a story: “Monsters get harder and harder and harder, then they get the hardest, then you’re done.”, but the set-up of being a marine stranded on a station with a gate to hell didn’t tie in at any point during the game. Can it really be called a story if the only important value change that takes place over the entire game is “You’re screwed” changes to “Maybe you’re not screwed after all”, changes back to “No, you actually are totally screwed”?

“You’re stranded on Mars with a bunch of demons” obviously isn’t a story, because it’s completely static. Nothing changes, so you have no story. “You’re stranded on Mars with a bunch of demons, but you finally kill enough demons and get out” is a story, albeit a lame one. So, if nothing else, we’ve nailed down that the essence of a story is that something must change. Even if the point of a story is that nothing changes, the player’s expectation changes, which might be enough. They begin the story expecting that things will change, and end the story knowing that things will not.

However, more to the point of dialogue versus story, I think it’s obvious that good dialogue cannot save a bad story. A combination of good dialogue, good gameplay, graphics, music, whatever else, can save a game, but no amount of good dialogue can make the story parts enjoyable if they’re badly done.

Can good story save bad dialogue? I happen to think so. I already stated my opinion on the lackluster dialogue and hamfisted delivery in Xenogears, but no one can say I didn’t enjoy the story.

A better example would be The World Ends With You. As I said in my review, the dialogue was passable, but not exceptional. There was no crackling subtext, and characters are guilty more than once of telling instead of showing. And yet, at one point in the game, Beat, a punk teenager, tells the main character about his relationship with his parents. He pretty much just explains it, then explains how he feels, which is the sign of uninventive dialogue, and yet, when we read the story of a teenager who is relentlessly pressured to succeed by his parents, and gives up on himself as a self-defense mechanism, so his parents will give up on him too, that rings true with us.

The delivery method (dialogue) is nothing special, but the events behind the dialogue can speak to everyone, because everyone knows the shame of disappointing someone you care about, and the crazy things we do to protect ourselves from having to feel that way.

I think that stumbles onto another key element of (good) story. I’ve already said this (and Robert McKee said it before me even better, and I’m pretty sure Aristotle said it before him), but a story needs to touch something we can relate to. The history of the formation of the earth up until the appearance of mankind is only a story in as much as we impose human emotions and intentions on objects and living things that came before us. Without a human element, it’s a story about as much as a an ice cube melting on your kitchen table. Yeah, there’s a significant change, but who gives a damn?

Now, the epic struggle of a single denizen of the table that stands out amongst the rest, and his brave, but ultimately futile struggle against the forces of entropy… that’s a story.

Mature and Guns

2008-06-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Sestren (with some outside assistance) recently coined a phrase, “Mature and Guns”, which is particularly helpful in discussing video game narratives, so I feel obligated to elaborate on it here.

Shadow the Hedgehog is a (fairly) recent Sega release, starring a supporting character from the Sonic Adventure series. Shadow is Sonic’s rival. He’s black and red, contrasting Sonic’s Blue and White, has just the right combination of Emo and Death Metal to counteract Sonic’s Blink 182 Pop-style.

I’ll cut to the chase. Shadow the Hedgehog is a terrible game. It’s a logistical train wreck, (If you pause to review the missions, but you don’t have any missions yet, you can’t access the “Close Menu” option, freezing your game.) but that’s not the problem.

“Mature and Guns” is a phrase that describes something that intentionally panders to an audience that takes itself more seriously than it deserves to be taken, usually early teenage boys. The term originated with this game because, inexplicably, Shadow the Hedgehog picks up a gun near the beginning. He didn’t have a gun in any of the games he appeared in previously, and he seemed to get along fine without it. To go with his new gun, he also has a boatload of existential crises, and if I understand it correctly, could be maybe a clone, an alien, or a robot, depending on how you finish the game.

Now, understand me, I’m not against existential crises. I think you can get a huge amount of good storytelling mileage out of them, but if your premise is a black emo hedgehog with a gun, who may or may not have been created by this man, the sudden shift into serious territory makes it ridiculous. The term “Mature and Guns” specifically came from imagining the conversation in the Sega board room:

“Okay. With this new Sonic game, we’re looking to try to tap into a much more mature audience. Teenagers love video games.”
“Alright, let’s go down the list. We’ve got darker atmosphere, check, intolerably long cutscenes, check.”
“Oh! Oh! All them kids loved that Final Fantasy 7 business, why don’t we do it like that?”
“Existential Crises, check.”
“I know! All the kids love GTA too, right? Let’s give him a gun! Nothing says ‘adult’ like guns!”
“Great! Alright, I’m beat, let’s get lunch.”

To reiterate: Mature and Guns describes a game which is intentionally pandering to an audience that takes itself more seriously than it deserves to be taken.

The fact that this term also perfectly describes Final Fantasy 8, which introduced the gunblade is purely incidental.

The Holy Mother of Nisan

2008-06-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

This month’s round table topic (hosted by Corvus Elrod at Man Bytes Blog) is “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. It asks those contributing to write about a character relationship that they found memorable or compelling in some way, and why.

Well written romance has always seemed rather beyond the pale of console games. There are those that don’t try (7th Saga), those that try and fail (Final Fantasy 8), and even some that do a pretty good job (Chrono Trigger), but only one console game romance that really stuck with me in all my years of playing story heavy RPGs.

I won’t explain the plot of Xenogears (it’s complicated enough by itself, and its ham-fisted delivery ensures that playing the game is no guarantee you know what the heck is going on), but I do feel obligated to talk about why I felt the romance was effective and memorable, as opposed to the lackluster romances found in most console RPGs, or the frequently awkward romantic exchanges between the players’ personal avatars and NPCs.

The game deals with the subject of reincarnation, which provides the handy little storytelling device of flashbacks to hundreds of years ago that give important plot info, but also build the relationship between the two main characters, Fei and Elly. This conveniently telescopes the amount of time you need to build a satisfying relationship, which is kind of a must, given that romantic relationships are barely ever at the forefront of RPGs, and not being given enough time is usually the problem with establishing compelling relationships in games.

Well, the amount of time given and the quality of the writing in the first place (which is not to be confused with the quality of dialogue, which I’m astonishingly forgiving about). Xenogears delivers on this front as well. I won’t go into every event that determines the course of the relationship, but the story pays very close attention to how their personalities interact:

Fei can’t have a healthy relationship with Elly because he has too many unresolved issues towards his mother, and alternates between treating Elly as a surrogate mother figure, and hating her because she reminds him of his own mother. Someone put enough thought into this to see that this leads to an interesting approach/avoid behavior on behalf of Fei. He’s glad to see her, and tries to look out for her well being, but can’t bring himself to spend any actual time with her.

Likewise, Elly, having a mediocre mother figure herself, is unsure of how to relate to Fei, and unsure of how to make use of her power and natural maternal instinct until she is no longer under the thumb of her own mother. She develops romantic feelings for Fei fairly early on, but matches his ambivalence with her inability to free herself of her parents (represented originally as the military).

Ultimately, she reconciles with her parents, and splits from her home country for good to travel with Fei, and is rewarded with the unlocking of memories from past lives (reincarnation, remember?), which serve to very quickly mold her into the person that she is destined to become, an almost perfect embodiment of The Warrior Mother.

Fei’s resolution, however, hinges on the moment where you finally learn that his mother died in an accident that was (possibly) intentionally caused by Fei. Despite their terrible relationship and her complete disregard for Fei, her maternal instinct kicks in, and she sacrifices herself for the life of her child. He realizes this, and in the final chapter, he steps up enough to be able to save Elly, while at the same time saving himself from the guilt of (possibly) killing his own mother.

This kind of metaphorical puppetry of the whole story is what fascinates me. In all previous reincarnations, Elly reaches this perfected Warrior Mother state, then loses her life saving Fei from overwhelming danger (the suggestion being that the sacrifice of one person of overwhelming virtue can do amazing things, stepping up the Christian Allegory of the game from “clumsy” to “half-way thought out”). However, when Fei successfully saves Elly at the end, he is (metaphorically, of course) saving his own mother, and breaking the cycle of Elly’s inevitable death.

I don’t know about you, but compared to any other inter-character romance in a console game, well... there’s just no comparison in my book. Nothing comes close to this in terms of level of complexity, attention to subconscious motivations, and ability to withstand literary criticism.

There’s a great deal to be said about why few other games rise to this level, but that’s for another post.

Next week: Another entry in my audacious attempt at Lexicon building. “Mature and Guns”!

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

2008-06-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

Chalk to up to writer's bloc, chalk it up to the fact that it's a Monday, whatever you blame, it's time for more...

VIDEO GAME HAIKU!

(For the original post, see: http://htparnell.blogspot.com/2008/05/haiku.html )

Legend of Mana

GameFAQs is useless!
No one knows how to temper!
Let's play whack-a-map.

Landstalker

Isometric view
Means ground breaking visuals
Shit! Jumping puzzles!

World of Warcraft

Raiding DPS?
I hope you are a warlock
No? GTFO

Warcraft III

Four races clash swords
Delicate gameplay balance
HUNTRESS RUSH LOLZORZ!!1!11ONE

Final Fantasy 4

Though you get there first
You never save the crystal
Goddammit, Golbez!

Nintendogs

This puppy is great
Now what button do I press
To get a real dog?

The World Ends With You

2008-05-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

Though I have yet to grind out all of the secrets, or all of the extra plot information, I still judge this to be a good time to blog out my thoughts on The World Ends With You. I beat it fairly recently, and was incredibly impressed. I was a little wary of it when it first came out, because I was afraid that the Jet Grind Radio-ish style was designed to pander to younger kids, and convince them that they entire game was some kind of Mountain Dew Commercial.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this was not the case. The music, character design, dialogue, even the item descriptions, are all fairly well crafted to contribute to a central aesthetic, and for entirely unclear reasons, I find it delightful (as opposed to obnoxious) that when the main character finds a special item, he goes “Hey, what’s this? Oh, snap!”

To sum everything up: The music is of surprisingly high caliber, both for composition and for sound quality on the DS. The gameplay is frantic, but complicated enough to be engaging, and still provides enough customization to hook people who like powergaming. The dialogue is not incredibly inspired, but avoids being awkward, and is written with a careful eye towards how different characters say the same thing differently.

The two things that impressed me most about this game are the central aesthetic, which I mentioned briefly, and the speed at which they launch you into the story.

First, the premise behind the game is a bizarre one that you don’t entirely discover until about a third of the way through the story. Namely, ghosts playing a survivor-esque game in a metropolitan Japanese city for a chance to come back to life. Not only was I impressed with the speed at which they educated you in the intricacies of the game, but I was also very impressed with the variations they made to the status-quo of the game once you were comfortable operating within it.

Most stories that have a bizarre premise and a main character that starts with no knowledge of the world they operate in spend a majority of the story explaining how the world the main character operates in is different from the one he or she is used to. The World Ends With You does a fantastic job of starting (with a similarly uneducated main character) with this premise, teaching you about it, then having the events of the story fundamentally alter the way the world works, so that your knowledge of the premise is no longer valid.

Regarding the feel of the game, I already summed it up pretty well. Everything in the game contributes to the same aesthetic. The way the characters talk, the design of the environments, the music, the mid-battle chatter, the equipment system, the character advancement system, everything in this game contributes to the metropolitan, skater, “Live by your own rules” aesthetic. I’m sure you’re wondering right now, “How exactly can the equipment system of a game contribute to an aesthetic?” but that would be a good time to defer to “You just gotta play the game.”

Oh, and by the way, the theme of The World Ends With You is “Only by connecting with the people around you can you truly broaden your horizons”, hence the name. This is NOT the core fantasy of the game, which is “I can live by my own rules”.

Iron Man

2008-05-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

It’s been several weeks, but I still feel obligated to wind out my thoughts having seen “Iron Man”.

Simply put, I liked the movie. A lot. It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but I enjoyed seeing it in theaters, and will see it again if invited. (I’m not really the type to organize a get together to see a movie in theaters a second time) I could go on and on about how getting me to possibly see a movie in theaters twice is a fairly huge achievement, given my movie going habits, but the point is made. If that doesn’t convince you, one merely needs to look at the numbers: Over 430 million dollars worldwide so far.

So, why is Iron Man so good, and why is that of particular interest to me?

When Marvel Studios was first founded in 1993, they were in the business of licensing their properties to movie studios, believing that it was easier to hire people accomplished in the movie industry rather than try to build a studio themselves.

Then came “Hulk”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_%28film%29 provides a fairly good overview of the movie, but all you need to know is that critical reception was lukewarm at best, and it received the infamous title of the largest single opening weekend to a movie that still failed to earn $150 million nationally. I’m not 100% sure of how the story goes, but I’ve heard that in the wake of this film specifically, Marvel decided that their intellectual properties were better off in their own hands than in the hands of another studio. They formed a distribution deal with Paramount, and begin producing their own movies, with the outside consultation of Avi Arad, former Marvel CEO. “Iron Man” is the first film to come out of this arrangement.

Opinions are all over the place, but personally, “Iron Man” is my favorite Marvel movie so far. It would seem that knowing your intellectual properties backwards and forwards is more important than being an accomplished and established studio with previous experience in the industry. Likewise, it seems that if the people who know the property hold on to creative control come hell or high water, it won't necessarily make a better movie, but it will make a movie that delivers better on the expectations of people who go to see it, which is almost the same thing.

It's also worth noting, by the way, that I was a little skeptical about the remake of the Hulk movie set for later this year. The rumors say, however, that Edward Norton was asked to be the original, and turned it down, because he didn't think it was going to be very good.

Haiku

2008-05-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Giants:

Quick! Grab the Jet-ski!
Run it into that guy's foot!
Multiplayer sucks.

Shining Force:

No, don't promote yet!
Your stats go down when you do
Now your werewolf sucks

Fallout 2:

Hide in those trees there.
Now stab that guy in the groin!
Then the eyes. Repeat.

The World Ends With You:

I can't wear this hat?
What do you mean I'm not brave?
Guess I'll eat ice cream

Harvest Moon:

Bachelors work late nights
But husbands are home by six
Hope you fed that gnome

Rune Factory:

It's a fantasy farm
But mostly just makes Chris mad
'Cause he keeps dying

Smash Brothers Brawl:

Bowser doesn't suck
Do forward B! Forward B!
No really, that's it.

Dungeon Master:

It kills everything?
I just throw clubs at monsters?
Wow, it really does work.

Knights of the Old Republic:

You are teh failzorz
Because you can't stun a droid
AC gets hard-capped

Quiz and Dragons:

How exactly does
Knowing Shaq's role in “Kazam”
Help me beat this imp?

And here is a little supplimental Haiku, by my good friend the Fridge:

Chrono Trigger:

Though you came through time
To thwart an ancient evil
Please fight this T-Rex

Saga Frontier:

Seven Characters
None of which I care about
Lute has no story!

Xenogears:

To play card games well
Mash the X button, unless
You want Bart to scream

I encourage you to leave your own. If the response is favorable enough, I might make it a weekly thing.

A little different

2008-05-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

I have more to say about Core Fantasies, and would like to put in a note on my thoughts on "Iron Man", which I saw this weekend, but hat's not for now. First, here's a little something I hammered out in a single sitting today. Very rough, and intended to be solely atmospheric, but thought you might enjoy.

“In an old story, which may or may not be true, we lived, with all the tribes of humanity, at the top of our mountain.”

Auberon's father gestured lazily towards the mountain he had spent his entire life in the shadow of. Even though they were now much farther down into the valley below, the mountain seemed to stay roughly the same size.

“There were four people, two men, and two women, who left that mountain. No one remembers their names. Perhaps they were stripped of them when they left paradise, but of this you can be sure: They were strength, cunning, knowledge, and compassion.” Auberon's father stopped walking for a moment, and reached out to touch a small trickle of water coming down a rock from the waterfall above. “It makes one wonder what the mountain was left with after their departure.” Another pause. “We will camp next to the falls tonight.”

Auberon's father was by no means a small man, but he was already beginning to be dwarfed by his son, even in his adolescence. The waterfall they camped near the base of, however, threatened to swallow them both with just the mist it created. His father hadn't spoken since the cryptic comment about the mountain, choosing instead to communicate his intentions through pointing and vague facial expressions. Auberon had heard the story many times before, but in all his life, his father had never repeated himself unintentionally. “Strength and Cunning were our father and our mother, and it is said that when they stopped to rest, they carved the land to suit their purposes, and from their union sprung the entire tribe.” Auberon knew the entire story up to this point, so he had spent more time standing in awe of the waterfall than really listening. “I am an old man, and-”

The lack of the opening phrase, “And it is said that” snapped Auberon's ears to attention instantly, but his father had paused, leaving Auberon's ears little to pick up other than the roar of the water. “I'm left to wonder sometimes, how long Strength stayed with his children. I hear he traveled over the cleft, and left his mark there as well.” Auberon's father glanced off towards the more densely wooded valley below, and seemed to trace the river from the waterfall to where it disappeared in the jungle surrounding the nearby city. “I sometimes wonder too if Ninevah is as lost as we are; if our valley has seen the departure of Compassion as well as Strength...”

Core Fantasies

2008-04-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

So what's a “Core Fantasy”? The definition I tend to fall back on is this:

The Core Fantasy of an Intellectual Property is an assumption contained within the IP about the human condition that affirms something we already believe.

Again, it's easy to give examples, but it's hard to nail down a good universal definition. I say “affirms something we already believe”, which doesn't mean that all Core Fantasies make statements about the human condition that everyone agrees with. It means that we love stories that confirm things we already believe/want to believe. So, if the above definition didn't do it for you, let's talk about what the core fantasy is not.

The Core Fantasy of an IP is not the moral of the story. I would be hard pressed to say that Grand Theft Auto has a moral, but it still has a Core Fantasy.

The Core Fantasy of an IP does not have to be a positive message. Carol gave the excellent example of “Chinatown”, which says that there is evil in the world, and sometimes evil wins, and all you can do is pick yourself up and move on. You could argue that “pick yourself up and move on” is a positive message, but certainly not like “love conquers all”.

The Core Fantasy of an IP does not have to be unique to the property. “Titanic”, “Moulin Rogue”, and “Sleepless in Seattle” all have exactly the same Core Fantasy: Love can overcome all obstacles (even, in the case of the first two, death)

The Core Fantasy of an IP does not have to be tied to any one storyline. Transformers, Final Fantasy, and Bruce Springsteen all have Core Fantasies, but no single, definite narrative.

So, why does anybody care? First let's look at marketing. Knowing your Core Fantasy helps you know who you're trying to reach with this property. The idea that love conquers all obstacles clearly resonates with 13-18 year old girls (other people too, to be sure, but that made up the majority of the people who were repeat theater viewers of “Titanic”). No matter what the events of the story, a Core Fantasy about “going the distance” is going to appeal to primarily men. I'm no marketing expert, so I can't give you a complex breakdown, but if you're going to try to market any mature story, you need to understand what you're trying to say, and who will want to hear it.

Second, it gives you an understanding of how to craft peripheral events. I've thrown around the idea of “thematic consistency” kind of hoping no one will call me out to define it, but ideally, even the not immediately plot important events in a story will contribute to the Core Fantasy, or at least not counteract it.

Finally, it allows you to craft a climax that delivers powerfully on the emotional promise of the story. I reiterate here that the purpose of the climax is more to provide emotional satisfaction than logical satisfaction. If you understand what your Core Fantasy is, you can easily see whether your climax affirms this or not. If your protagonist triumphs over your villain, but not in a way that relates to your Core Fantasy, the audience feels cheated. If Apollo Creed had a heart attack right before the fight in “Rocky”, it sucks, but if Ferris Bueller only succeeds in the end through a massive feat of willpower and endurance, it's just confusing.

So, what does the Warrior Princess (see here for an explanation of the archetype) have to do with this concept? I submit that the inclusion of this archetype requires that the Core Fantasy be close to a certain archetypal Core Fantasy. The closer the Warrior Princess is to the main character, the closer the Core Fantasy is to this archetypal Core Fantasy.

This Archetypal Core Fantasy is not a clear cut Core Fantasy itself, but it is usually a variation on either the power of nature, or the incredible untapped power of the human being itself. Perhaps that humanity, in its natural state, possesses incredible power. It is invariably a positive (though sometimes bittersweet) message, and usually affirms the fundamental goodness of humanity, but also affirms the ability for them to go wrong when injected with hubris.

I considered working backwards through all seventeen of my examples, but I imagine that would be redundant. That being said, though, for your edification, here's my list of core fantasy examples: (Note, this list is confined to games and movies. Music, books, and anything else that can tell a story can have a core fantasy, but I'm keeping it simple)

Final Fantasy – “Nature is more complicated and more wonderful than humanity knows”
Grand Theft Auto, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Usual Suspects – “I don't have to play by the rules”
Titanic, Moulin Rogue, etc. - “Love conquers all”
Phoenix Wright, Lucky Number Slevin, Payback - “Eventually, Justice will be served”
Sideways, American Splendor - “No matter how many times you've failed, you can always try again”
Shining Force - “If I champion a righteous cause, people will follow me.”
Star Wars - “One person, no matter how small, can change the universe”
LA Confidential - “Just because I do things differently from you, doesn't mean I'm not doing the right thing.”

I could go on, but I like that list. Now, I throw the ball in your court. What are your favorite Core Fantasies? Do you disagree with any examples I listed? I'd even encourage you to leave comments with some Intellectual Properties, see if I can pick out the Core Fantasy.

Part Three!

2008-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

of a series that wasn't supposed to have more than one part.

For reference:
Part 2: http://htparnell.blogspot.com/2008/04/warrior-mother.html
Part 1: http://htparnell.blogspot.com/2008/04/final-fantasy-and-hayao-miyazaki.html

The important aspect that's been missing from the last two posts on the subject is a closer inspection of the purpose of the roundtable to begin with. If a game features a character like this, what does it mean about the plot arc of the game, and what does it mean for the game mechanics?

It's a little hard to say for the game mechanics. This archetype appears almost exclusively in Japanese games (though if you have any thoughts on Western products that fit the bill, I'd love to hear), and most often in Japanese RPGs. Ultimately, though, nothing necessarily connects the RPG format to the character, other than the prevalence of RPGs in Japanese games, and the prevalence of the character in Japanese RPGs. So, instead of attacking it from that angle, I'm going to come up with a story format that necessitates the character, and then see what game mechanics lend themselves most easily to that story.

The plot arc of the Warrior Mother is, much like the Brash Young Hero archetype, a coming of age story. Much like Joseph Campbell's journey, the Warrior Mother must become fully realized. She must discover her physical heritage. She must conquer self doubt. She must cast aside the example of her current mother, or embrace the example that her mother left behind. Finally, she must learn that her power is to be used for healing, not for war.

I use the word “healing” in the broadest sense here. Example: Mist (from the GC Fire Emblem) is the only one who can hold onto the talisman of ultimate evil without being corrupted. The peace at the center of her soul doesn't restore HP, but it means that she can keep the talisman hidden away from the forces that would use it for personal gain.

On a side note, I expect that FF7 was so popular with the 13-18 crowd because Aeris is the completely self-realized version of this archetype. She has no character arc, and it's her lack of faults that makes her death seem so tragic to the player.

All of this lends itself most easily to an RPG. There are enough facets to the story that a long narrative suits it best (though a very short one could be fascinating to see). Someone realizing that they're not destined to fight makes for a very difficult main character in a video game (though Ultima IV comes to mind), so the archetype lends itself to a secondary role, or at least a game with another primary character. None of this, however, requires any particular kind of game. It wouldn't work as a main character very well, but there's no reason this archetype can't appear in adventure games, FPSs, anything and everything. What is does, if the character is important enough to the plot, is fundamentally alter the core fantasy of the game. I've used the term before, but it requires a better definition. So, for next week, what's a core fantasy, and how does the Warrior Mother affect it?

Technical Difficulties

2008-04-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

Well, not really, but a crazy week for work, so I haven't had as much time as I'd like. That being said, I'll have the second follow-up to the warrior princess concept up soon. Until then, I was particularly pleased to read this post, so I direct your attention to it: http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/2008/04/themes-of-isolation/

Enjoy, while I finish putting out fires.

Music and Lyrics

2008-04-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

While there's plenty more to be said on the subject of archetypes, and I plan to post another little ditty on the subject, but until I'm done polishing the essay, here's this:

This time, I'd like to draw your attention to the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROt6hC7WWio

For those of you who don't have 3 minutes, don't have sound, or are just too lazy to do any more clicking than absolutely necessary, it's a cut-scene from the re-release of LUNAR: Silver Star Story Complete. I'm not really here to comment on the quality of the scene, so I won't talk about the lip flap (terrible), the song (decent), or the direction (actually quite good). I'm here to comment on two things, the concept of vocal performance in games, and the host of comments on the YouTube video.

First of all, I'd like to point out, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that nothing like this song has been featured in a game before or since. Final Fantasy 8 contained the disastrous “Eyes on Me” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNefNLOHVYk for those who need a refresher), but even that was an actual event in the game. The characters heard on the radio a song sung by a plot important character. Xenogears, lots of Final Fantasies, even Portal all featured ending songs with words (some to greater effect than others), but the song from Lunar (Wind's Nocturne) is roughly akin to how characters would break into song in a musical. If the following events were happening in real life, there wouldn't actually be any music and nobody would be singing. However, since we can, we're going to use music and lyrics to help tell the story.

Again, abstracting the issue from any question of quality of the Lunar scene, this requires the question: “Why hasn't anyone else ever done this?” Three obvious reasons spring out:

1. It's expensive. You need to pay somebody to write more music, write lyrics, and voice actors who are also required to sing most likely command a larger salary, to say nothing of hiring someone else to be the singing voice of an existing actor, or hiring someone for a game that otherwise wouldn't have voice actors. (I should point out, about voice actors who are also required to sing, I have no actual experience with the relative salaries commanded by voice actors, this is just my intuition)

2. It's time consuming. In addition to the extra time demanded by writing the music and words involved, recording a song takes much more time than dialog of equivalent quality. Really though, it doesn't require so much more time that this doesn't reduce to just an issue of money.

3. Studios don't think there's an audience that cares.

So, money is the big issue here. Becoming increasingly tapped into the writing for games industry, these really sound like the complaints that people have about why writing in a lot of video games sucks. Many studios don't want to hire writers when they can just fob off the writing task on some designer. (Not to say that there aren't designers who are great writers) After all, paying some one to do two jobs is better than paying two people, right? It's the general consensus that many studios are reticent to bring in professional writers, because it's unclear how paying a writer will lead to more profits for the game. I expect nobody experiments with the power of music and lyrics because it's not really clear how it contributes to making a better selling game.

And therein is my second topic. The power of music and lyrics. If you'll take a quick check over the comments on the Lunar video, people love it. They talk about it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. I've already said, the song is pretty good, in the Disney musical style genre, the directorial eye is fairly good about framing interesting shots, but it's not nearly as good as the comments would suggest.

Why is the response so powerful? Part of it has to be that nobody else does it. When somebody does something new, the threshold for being impressed is drastically lowered. Second, and this seems deceptively simple, people love music. Luna (the woman singing the song) wasn't a particularly unique character, and didn't have a really well written character arc, but because she has this moment of pouring her heart out in song, she instantly endears herself to most players. I'm not gonna try to answer why music allows us such quick access to emotion, but in a player that is concerned about story to begin with, less can truly be more. I'm willing to bet that players felt, after this song, a greater emotional connect to this character than could have been achieved with any dialog in three times the time.

(I also submit that the fact that there was only one song over the course of the game, and only one character who sang wasn't a sticking point, because the game set up from the very beginning that not only is Luna a signer, and commands some magical power with her singing voice, but she's also the only one really holds her deep thoughts inside, and takes quiet moments away from everyone else to reflect.)

Personally, I'd love to see someone try it again. Only a matter of time I expect.

The Warrior Mother

2008-04-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

I was in the middle of writing another response to the discussion going on in my comments when I realized that there were enough issues raised to require a follow-up post. Unfortunately, they're a little disjointed, so bear with me.

For those of you not in the know, check the post immediately below this one, (or http://htparnell.blogspot.com/2008/04/final-fantasy-and-hayao-miyazaki.html if you so desire) and the associated comments.

First of all, I would actually go so far as to advocate the label “warrior mother” above the other labels. Permit me to explain why.

I realized, after putting this list together, that the motherhood of these characters is paramount to their personality, even without having any actual children. Again, as opposed to mounting some sort of structured argument, I plan to merely present overwhelming evidence. None of these characters have mothers. Some no longer have one, or never have one mentioned (Luna, Lufia, Alma, Rena, Terra, Aeris, etc.), but many have mothers that fail significantly at being a mother figure. (Elly, Schala, Kara) For those of you who aren't familiar with Joseph Campbell, he suggests that in order for the hero to complete his journey, he either must beat his father in some kind of combat, or his father must die. As long as the hero has his father over him, he cannot become the hero of legend.

None of the characters I list actually have children, but close to all of them act as a mother as an important part of their character development. I could talk about Mist serving as Ike's surrogate mother, or about the flashback to Cloud's mother as he's going to bed for the first time in Aeris's house, or about how Schala's lack of a real mother forces him to act as Janus's mother, but I'll limit it to two really powerful examples, both referenced in the last post.

You find Terra in the orphanage in Mobliz in the world of ruin. She refuses to leave because she's the only real mother these kids have. She suppresses it to some degree to fight Kefka, but the point is still made.

Elhaym van Houten has a very strong motherhood streak, and, as I have said before, serves as a surrogate mother to Fei. She steps into the role of the “Holy Mother of Nisan”, a religious leader, and is, in an unexpectedly literal way, the mother of all humanity. It almost suggests to me that they're intentionally pointing to the archetype.

Again, it's not perfect. Zelda has no mother, and no exclusively maternal qualities, but I think the point is made.

Second, in my response, I mentioned that someone I talked with constructed a very good argument for the Warrior Mother being a non-sexist extension of the woman's role in Japanese culture into a fantasy setting. (That was the worst sentence ever) The case went something like this. The concept of women in the workplace is quite a bit behind the western concept. Women are expected, much more than in the US, to stay home, take care of the kids, take care of the housework, and remain generally passive. However, within the domain of the household, the woman calls the shots. Interestingly enough, they also control the finances of the home. (This is all stereotypes, remember, so it doesn't have to be universally true) The husband has some authority within the home, but it is usually deferred to the wife, in belief that this is their area of expertise. If you buy that activity is the essential male quality, and passivity is the essential female quality, and don't assume (as the west in wont to do) that activity is somehow better than passivity, then try to make a game about those gender roles, I expect you'll end up with a main female character like the warrior princess (or mother, or something of the sort). She can fight, but doesn't like to; she nurtures everyone around her, and she has incredible power that largely operates behind the scenes.

Finally, regarding the staff chick, I think whoever wrote the article was keyed in to the idea of the archetype, but was much more concerned with the game mechanics side of the archetype (which does exist), and less about the character development aspect.

Corvus asked specifically how I think this archetype influences the game mechanics of the game. The simple answer is that it doesn't, but that seems a little glib and canned to me. There's a lot to say on the matter though, so I'll have an entire post on it next. I can't say too much about how it has influenced gameplay in the past, but I can say a lot about how it influences plot development, and provide some interesting suggestions for how it might influence game play in the future.

Final Fantasy and Hayao Miyazaki

2008-04-04T14:50:00.000-07:00

For the April '08 Roundtable (see http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/ for more details) the chosen subject is “Variations on a Theme” asking what you find unifies all your favorite games. I have some thoughts on game mechanics, music, and art, but since it's what really fires me up, I'm afraid I'm going to limit it to story here.

I've written a little bit about the fundamental concepts I'm a fan of, but I'm going to push all that aside, and talk about an archetype. That archetype is: the main female character of the Japanese RPG. I know what you're thinking, “That's too vague to be an archetype”. Well, permit me to explain. Obviously, not all characters can be lumped into this category, but you'd be surprised what it does cover.

Imagine the following character: A woman, fairly young, of noble birth. She possesses some combat prowess, but doesn't enjoy fighting. She is often lost in thought, and is more passive and introspective than those around her. She is not terribly secure in herself and her abilities at the beginning, and frequently this insecurity is defused in the form of her being huffy. She is not that physically strong, but is very intelligent. When she fights, she tends to use magic, but beyond the magic that many people have, it is suggested that she has some special power that remains largely untapped for a majority of the game. When she is forced to bring this power to bear, you discover that it is very different from anyone else you've seen so far, and that that power is primarily used for healing, rather than conflict.

Sound familiar? I could waffle, but let's cut to the chase:

Terra – Final Fantasy 6
Aeris – Final Fantasy 7
Rinoa – Final Fantasy 8
Dagger – Final Fantasy 9
Yuna – Final Fantasy 10
Elly – Xenogears
Nina – Breath of Fire (pick anyone you want)
Elle – Terranigma
Marona – Phantom Brave
Rena – Star Ocean 2
Kara – Illusion of Gaia
Lufia – Lufia and the Fortress of Doom
Mist – Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Zelda – Legend of Zelda
Luna – LUNAR: SSSC
Alma – Final Fantasy Tactics
Schala – Chrono Trigger

It's possible there are more I've missed (these are just from games I've played), but the point is made. Very few of these entries are perfect: Terra doesn't really affect the outcome of the final few hours of the game with her powers, Marona isn't of noble birth, and Schala isn't actually the main female character, but the correlation is far too significant to deny. This is an archetype that Japanese game makers have relied on since I was a young boy playing games.

It's possible that, pointing out the similarities between these characters, some of you feel cheated, like the conceptual design for the later characters was lazy, not bothering to design a new character, and merely re-hashing old concepts. I, for one, do not feel cheated at all. I am a big Joseph Campbell fan, and strongly believe in the power of archetypes in storytelling. Just because a game tells the same story we've heard a thousand times before (redemption, love, triumph over evil), it doesn't make it any less satisfying when we see it. Likewise, just because we've seen Terra in the orphanage, holding the kids in her heart, doesn't make it any less touching when you see Elly slice open her finger to feed the monster at the wels plant.

Much of good storytelling, storytelling that provokes a cathartic release, is based on the power of these characters that bypass all issues of particularity in a story. We want a fresh and interesting take on a character, but unless it ties back to something that we can understand, and relate to in our lives, the emotional power is lost.

So then, perhaps you are willing to grant that something like this has always existed in some form or another in storytelling, but I hardly think that Jung elucidated the “Japanese RPG Female Character” archetype in so many words. So then, when did this combination of the warrior, wise woman, mother, and priestess begin? I have my theory, but I welcome all thoughts on the matter.

In 1982, as a part time job, Hayao Miyazaki started drawing a comic about a Princess of a small country in a post apocalyptic world. The manga was called Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, named for the minor character from the Odyssey. Miyazaki cited two primary inspirations for the character, Bernard Evslin's translation of the Odyssey, which expanded on the original princess's character significantly, and a Japanese story of an insect loving princess from somewhere between 800 and 1200 in Japan. Nonetheless, Miyazaki's portrayal of this character (and later in the 1984 movie of the same name) is the first record I can find of this archetype. She is born as the princess of a periphery country, and is skilled in the use of arms, but has a strong pacifist streak. She is thoughtful, introspective, and seems to exist on a mental level separated from all those around her. Finally, though the manga and film differ on this subject significantly, she is clearly possessing of some sort of quasi-supernatural power that allows her a deeper understanding of the world around her.

So, what does this mean? Since I'm such a strong believer in the power of archetypes, it only seems appropriate that I want to know what archetype I'm appealing to when I write, and even more, know what the history of that archetype is. To do otherwise seems something like trying to write a monster movie without watching the original Godzilla...

I've only played so many games, so if you know of any really good examples, or want to hear my reasoning for any of my 17 examples, leave me a note or drop me a line.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Phoenix Wright, continued

2008-04-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

As promised, more about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, than you ever wanted to know. I'm not really here to tell you what the game is like, I refer you to the excellently composed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright) for that purpose. I'm here to talk to you about the thematic elements of the game.

So what the hell does “thematic elements” mean? Instead of answering that question, allow me to launch into a discussion of Phoenix Wright, then use that to wrap it up:

Throughout the first three games of the series (ones where Phoenix is the protagonist), Phoenix enjoys virtually unheard of success as a Defense Attorney. If you really break it down, Phoenix has the following things going for him: He's very smart, he's very good at reading people, and most importantly, he believes in the innocence of his client, no matter what. Being intelligent, imaginative, and being able to read people's reactions well are all obviously helpful for an attorney (even one operating in the bastardized legal system that the games take place in). His unwavering belief in the innocence of his clients, however, is what makes his a great defense attorney, like Mia Fey (his mentor) was. It's even suggested that this kind of faith is what separates defense attorneys from prosecutors. Edgeworth (Phoenix's rival) tells one of Phoenix's defendants that a prosecutor's job is to doubt, while a defense attorney's job is to believe in people. To go even farther, the game suggests that prosecutors are the kind of people who could make for good defense attorneys, but have had their faith in justice shaken, or are blinded by some glaring personality defect. To wit:

Edgeworth's life with law started when he defended Phoenix against the accusations of classmates in elementary school, but eventually he becomes a prosecutor, prompted by the death of his father (also a defense attorney).
Manfred von Karma and his daughter, Franziska, both have the intelligence and ingenuity, but are blinded by hubris, the former is too attached to his win record to see justice done, and the latter is mostly engaged in law as a way to prove her worth.
Godot was an excellent defense attorney, but was unable to continue in the face of the sheer injustice of Mia's death, so he became a prosecutor instead.
Even Lana Skye, featured in only a single case in the first game, and never as an acting prosecutor, has the tremendous baggage of trying to shield her sister from what she perceives as the cruel world around her, which prevents her from trusting Phoenix to see that justice is served.

Taken together, these paint a picture of prosecutors as broken down versions of defense attorneys, lacking the emotional/spiritual wherewithal to separate their own negative experiences from their interactions with the justice system. All of these prosecutors are deeply wounded people, which brings up another important facet of the game. Virtually every case has a complicated interpersonal element, which is fascinating to watch unfold (much more so than legal proceedings tied to impersonal things). People in these cases lie and commit crimes because of their fears and hang-ups, and in the course of discovering the truth, Phoenix exposes these wounds. In the course of bringing them to light in the courtroom, Phoenix slices through and resolves much of this baggage. Just in case you haven't gotten enough lists yet:

Phoenix cuts through Edgeworth's self loathing, and proves him innocent of murder not once, but twice, allowing Edgeworth enough confidence to step into the role of defense attorney, even for just a day.
Phoenix frees both Lana and Ema Skye from the burden of guilt associated with the Joe Darke killings.
Phoenix allows Franziska to admit that she got into law to avenge her father and prove her worth to Edgeworth.
Phoenix saves Godot from going any further down the path of self destruction, and saves Maya from the shame associated with the Fey bloodline.

Mia even tells her sister, during the final case of the third installment: “Don't worry, Phoenix will save everyone.” Clearly, Phoenix possesses some kind of preternatural power to cut to the heart of another person's character.

Whenever Phoenix takes a case, it always seems completely impossible that his client could actually be innocent, and it's usually suggested that no one else will take the case because of how hopeless it looks. If Phoenix doesn't take the case, it will be legally decided that his clients are guilty of murder (Phoenix takes almost exclusively murder cases). So, if you'll hold my hand at this kind of complicated jump, it's Phoenix's belief in his clients that makes them innocent. He doesn't have any magic powers to change the past, but without his interference, they'd be declared guilty in a court of law, legally affirming that that's what happened. Furthermore, Phoenix is pushed to the brink of defeat over and over again, but only makes it back by assuming that his client is innocent, and then going off that assumption.

It's long been a Japanese tradition to make fiction about relatively mundane proceedings, and dramatize it as a life or death conflict. You can find countless animes about sporting events, mahjong, go, even trading card games. (Interestingly enough, that's why the Yu-Gi-Oh show was a clever marketing move in Japan, as opposed to just a laughable concept to most of the American audience.) However, this style works perfectly in Phoenix Wright, not only because it is an issue of life or death (the death penalty is given in the Phoenix Wright universe, not to mention all the victims), but because of the larger than life character that Phoenix is.

To return, I submit that the core fantasy of the Phoenix Wright games is that if you believe in something enough, and work for it enough, you can make anything happen, no matter how improbable it seems. Tim Schaefer talks about wish fulfillment as a large reason why people play games, and if you use that framework, a huge draw of the Phoenix Wright series is fulfilling the wish that you too, can do anything if you believe in it and work hard enough. It sounds corny, but I believe that watching the truth unfold from Phoenix's unwavering commitment scratches the same cathartic itch that, say, “The Princess Bride” does. In “The Princess Bride” it's about believing in the power of love, no matter the obstacles. In Phoenix Wright, it's about believing in the power of justice, no matter the obstacle. There's much more to be said about the themes of Phoenix Wright, which I may get to later, but that's plenty to read for now.

Up next: The April '08 Roundtable! (More details here: http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/2008/04/april-08-round-table/)

Magical Realism and Phoenix Wright

2008-03-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

Phoenix Wright 3: Trials and Tribulations features one of the most effective climaxes I've witnessed in a game. Permit me, if you will, an extended elaboration:

Near the end of the final trial, it becomes obvious to the player that Godot, the prosecuting attorney for the case, is the murderer. What clarifies this to Phoenix is that Godot, because of his Visor, cannot see red, and the remaining clues at the crime scene could only have been missed by a person who cannot see the color red clearly. The final nail in the coffin comes when it is proven that the murder was wounded during the killing, and that Godot has been hiding the wound under his visor. When asked to remove his visor, Godot balks, and confesses to the murder.

The confession, of course, is designed to pay off all of the set-ups laid out through the three games, and does an excellent job of doing so. At the height of emotion, a trickle of blood seeps out of Godot's visor. The witness says, “Mr. Godot! Your wound is bleeding!” and he counters with “No. Since the color red doesn't exist in my world... these must be my tears.” Cut to a flashback of Godot telling Phoenix's mentor: “The only time a lawyer can cry is when it's all over.”
There is more resolution to be had, but this represents the state of highest emotion for the entire game, and an impressive feat of storytelling in a game. To find out why it's so effective, let's talk about what the ending does.

1. It confirms the truth of Phoenix's accusation.
Since Godot does not remove his mask, until that point, there is no undeniable physical evidence that Godot was the murderer. Though he confesses, convicting someone at the end of the series without undeniable physical evidence would be an aesthetic betrayal of the game.

2. It tells the player that things are finally “all over”
The flashback, combined with Godot's tears, serve to tell the player that all the issues of the past have been dealt with, because it's time for Godot to cry. The timing of the flashback serves to remind the player of the inciting incident of the entire sad affair, and assure them that all the wounds have been dealt with, not just the case at hand.

3. It gives special insight into Godot's character
Godot's comment informs the player that he feels as if he is crying, but allows him to still make a witty rejoinder. Godot's character is dry and sarcastic to the end, even when he's brought to his lowest.

That is the real magic of the moment. The player suspends disbelief regarding the trickle out of Godot's mask. It cannot be both blood and tears, but if it's not tears, then Godot is no longer a sympathetic character, but if it isn't blood, then Godot has no wound, and cannot be convicted. The player, if they stopped to consider it, would lose the magic of the moment, but they understand that for now, it needs to be both, so they suspend disbelief. If Godot simply said, “It might as well be my tears”, not only would it violate the age old axiom of “show, don't tell”, it would remove the quasi-magical element. Does the player believing that Godot truly is crying add to the emotional impact of the moment? I say that it does.

The key lies in what a climax is supposed to do. People can argue that it depends heavily on what the target audience for a game is, but I am of the opinion that the emotional payoff of a climax is always more important than the logical payoff. Always. The player is willing to look over a fairly small logical anomaly (both blood and tears) in exchange for the delivery of a powerful emotional punchline (Godot's redemption).

Case in point: Hayao Miyazaki's film “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” (Kaze no Tani no Naushika, 1984) features a blatant Deus ex Machina style ending, yet is still critically acclaimed, and Nausicaa ranks highly in Japanese polls of favorite fictional characters. The viewer's desire to see an emotionally powerful culmination of events overpowers any logical criticism they might harbor.

I would even go so far as to say that too much attention to the logical explanation can ruin the magic of a moment. If Phoenix Wright had said, “No, that's clearly blood, but we know how you feel”, instead of just standing in awed silence, it would have completely ruined the moment. I feel like I still haven't entirely cracked the nut of why this magical suspension of disbelief enhances the quality of the emotional climax so much, but I've elaborated on the idea, at least. Soon to come, more about the core aesthetic of Phoenix Wright than you ever wanted to know!

(And yes, I know that "Magical Realism" has a clear-cut definition in fiction, and that this isn't it, maybe I'm just engaging in an audacious feat of lexicon-expansion, so there)

Story Style

2008-03-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Having already given my two cents on non-linear storytelling models, (that until most game studios change their opinion about the importance of storytelling in a game, trying to expand the paradigm will be largely wasted) that begs the question of what makes a good story. That's a huge question, and I'm not gonna try to tackle it, but the least I can do is talk about my preference.

I've always been partial towards character work. Interesting twists of fate and a good world to immerse yourself in have never been as engaging to me as a good character arc, plotted out with careful attention to the character's past, conscious objectives, unconscious objectives, and culminating in a profound, satisfying change. “Satisfying” in this case doesn't need to mean a change for the better, merely that the denouement scratches the itch that the writer has coaxed out of the gamer ever since the direction of the character arc becomes clear (this begs the question of non-linearity again, but we'll save that one).

Talking about creating a dramatic situation that demands satisfaction in the gamer is very much screenwriting language. The classic thought on the matter (though by no means the only one) is that you have to give the audience (interchangeable with “gamer” in my mind) what they want, but never in the way they expect. In “Die Hard”, if John McClane was never helpless at the hands of Hans Gruber, you'd feel cheated out of a good time. In Portal, at the end of the final test chamber, if you exited the facility with nothing more at stake, you'd feel cheated. And yet, if you were able to predict that (ZOMG SPOILERS) the main character of KotoR is Darth Revan, you felt a little disappointed when they revealed it to you. Likewise, you know that Bruce Willis has to beat Alan Rickman's character somehow, but if you guessed that he had a gun attached to his back with Christmas stamps, you'd be disappointed when the camera panned over to reveal it.

To reiterate, you need to give the gamer what they expect, but not the way they expect it. This requires a careful eye towards what you are coaxing the gamer to expect, which is the best argument I've ever heard for some kind of a narrative mastermind involved in a game. In an expertly directed game, everything should coax the player into anticipating the climax. A simple example: In a throne room, everything should direct the eye towards the person in the throne; the music should indicate a presentment; etc. etc. Though the player may not know exactly what position the throne bearer occupies, the general feel should be clear before anyone opens their mouths.

A more complicated example: In Final Fantasy VII, a lot of people were put off by the sudden introduction of Cloud's severe ontological crisis. It more or less came out of nowhere. There were some vague issues of Cloud not remembering some events, but it didn't seem to bother him, and weren't played as bearing any real importance. Suddenly, when his emo streak becomes crystallized in the form of “I am my own monster!”, people were left scratching their heads.

Final Fantasy VI, while prey to the cliché of “main character who can't remember her past”, let you know from the very beginning that Terra is going to have to resolve the question of who she is before she can meaningfully interact with the world around her. She resolves the issue of her physical heritage, but it's not until the orphanage in Mobliz that she is brought face to face with the issue of who she decides to be. The struggle in Mobliz is her realizing that her power, even her power to destroy, can be used for good. Again, an aware gamer will see this coming. The entire game hangs on the edge of whether mankind can be trusted with the power of magic safely, and Terra has her own issues to resolve, from her period as a victim of the slave crown. I'd love to launch into a discussion of Fei's issues with exercise of power in Xenogears, but that deserves its own essay. Suffice it to say that in Xenogears, while all these crazy outside events are going on, much of the game is designed to continually force Fei into reconsidering his position on the exercise of power. While you watch events unfold, everything tells you subconsciously that Fei is going to have to deal with this issue once and for all.

That, my friends, is my favorite kind of story. I've already stated that I'm partial to engaging character arcs, but what really seals the deal for me is a fascinating envelope that helps the character arc along. For all the epic science fiction in Dune, it's about Paul embracing the mantle of a messiah. For all the bizarre comments on human nature, Kino's Journey is about a girl who ran away from her conception of adulthood. For all the acrobatics, the newest Prince of Persia series is about the Prince realizing what it takes to become a man. For all the apocalyptic events, Xenogears is about Fei resolving his issues with his mother enough to embrace Elly as an equal, as opposed to a surrogate mother.

This is not meant to downplay the intricacies of the external plot developments. Portal is not known for the complex character arcs, Gordon Freeman is a relatively implacable character, and any MMORPG features completely inaccessible PCs, but that doesn't mean World of Warcraft doesn't feature an incredibly engaging world. I'm merely stating where my preference lies. Next up, magical realism, and the best kind of character development.

Games and Movies

2008-03-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

With the growing legitimacy of games as a storytelling medium, there's been a lot of talk about what games are capable of doing to tell stories that other mediums simply can't. A novel can give you inner dialog far better than a play or movie, while a movie lets you tell expansive, sweeping stories with far too many locations to ever be used in a play. Etc. etc., the list goes on.
Games can most easily be compared to movies. You have as many locations as you need to tell to tell the story, the story mostly occurs through outwardly visible events (an excess of internal monologue can bog the story down), and it lends itself fairly easily to spectacle. The question comes when you ask what facets of storytelling games lend themselves to more than anything else. Games aren't movies, but the easiest way to approach the question is to see how they differ importantly from them.

Games are longer – Though nowhere near all of the content is storytelling, games can easily tell stories that are far too long to be contained in a movie. This is not to say that they need to; Portal doesn't contain enough material to make any kind of a film, but no one can question the quality of the writing, despite the very simple story. (This actually necessitates the question of “writing” versus “storytelling”, but that's for another time)

Games get you attached to the main character much faster – This appeals to common sense, but I'd be interested to see some psychological study to back it up. When you control a character's movements, it creates the illusion of controlling the character's fate. Even if the gameplay is completely linear, you still control the fate of the character in terms of whether you pass the next challenge the game brings to bear. We identify with well written characters because they resemble us in some way. It doesn't matter that none of us have ever been charged with carrying a ring of ultimate evil; we can all look at Frodo, and remember times when we had a huge burden unwillingly thrust upon us. We want him to rise to the occasion because we want to think that, in the same situation, we would be able to rise to the occasion as well.

When a character does what we tell them to do, that bond forms that much faster. Curiously enough, this phenomenon manifests even if the player has minimal control over the fate of the character. The line waffles between wanting to complete the next challenge, and wanting Gitaroo Man to pass the next challenge, despite the fact that your “control” over Gitaroo Man consists of turning the analog stick and hammering arbitrary buttons to make him dodge clumsily. Nonetheless, I am more eager to pass the game's challenges because they also represent the struggles of this fictional character, as opposed to abstract hoops to jump through.

Games open up the possibility of non-linear story structure – Not since the choose your own adventure book has there been as much buzz as there is now about non-linear story structure. I'm not really going to open up the huge can of how best to do that, but suffice it to say that the holy grail of narrative design in games would be a game in which the player has full reign of the world around him, and the world reacts to anything the player wants to do, even going so far as to put dramatic emphasis on the events the player cares about, and tending to skip over the ones the player has spent less time engaging in.

No one has quite nailed this one on the head yet. It seems that no one has even really broken the code of how to approach a story from this angle. There's been a lot of interesting discussion on the topic, but I'm not here to push my opinion on what constitutes a non-linear storyline. The question that pops into my mind is “Does a game's story have to be non-linear?” A truly non-linear storytelling model would be revolutionary, but it wouldn't necessarily push older models out of the spotlight. Many gamers today grew up playing entirely linear Japanese RPGs, some of which (though by no means most) are still revered for the quality of the story. Likewise, if a non-linear story hit the market, it wouldn't attract very much attention if the story wasn't good to begin with. If you have an infinite number of options for potential fates of a character you couldn't care less about, well... that doesn't make people start caring.

All that being said, it seems that all this discussion of a good non-linear storytelling model isn't going to do a ton of good until the concept of writing in games has achieved a greater level of legitimacy. It seems a bit hackneyed to say it, but I'm not sure pushing the envelope will accomplish much until the current medium has been mastered. Until it becomes general knowledge that an excellent, emotionally engaging story sets a game apart, conceptual, high level thought about the nature of non-linear storytelling will be largely wasted on the mindset of a great deal of game studios.